Saturday, August 3, 2013

Nābytek by Chemoplast of Brno, Czechoslovakia

Well, this one was much harder to guess, as probably most of you, like me, will never have heard of this maker!


I've just looked up Nābytek on Google Translate, and it means Furniture in Czech. So that doesn't seem to be the brand name!


At one end of the box is more information, including the price, and also the name Chemoplast in Brno. (The line above that means 'higher authorities'.)



The other end of the box also says Chemoplast Brno, and has a logo in which the letters cp appear. The downstroke of the p seems to be a glass tube from a science laboratory.


So Chemoplast is the maker. They do seem to have copied the designs of Jean of West Germany's dolls house furniture - I'll have to see if I have any Jean pieces to compare with these.


The three words under Nābytek 'furniture' are bedroom, living room and dining room. The one shown in red is the one in the box.


They each have a different price, as you can see.




The living room is the most expensive, probably because it includes the grand piano with its opening lid.  The bedroom was only one koruna (crown) more than the dining room.

As the boxes state that the furniture was made in Czechoslovakia, they must predate 1993, when the country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Czech Wikipedia tells me that Chemoplast was established in Brno in 1952. Plastic toys were one of their main products. They went into liquidation after 1989 (although they started again a few years later, I think). I don't know when exactly these sets were made - perhaps in the 1970s, or perhaps the 1980s. I wonder if they had a licence from Jean, or just copied the pieces?

5 comments:

  1. Hello from Spain: Beautiful furniture. I did not know this brand. Keep in touch

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    1. Hello Marta! I didn't know it either. It's almost the same as Jean of West Germany, which is much easier to find!

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  2. Rummaging through my memory of having the green bedroom set and the means by which my parents or grandparents might have acquired it for me, I'm going to say 1973-1975. I had no idea it was from Czechoslovakia.

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  3. Ian from Czech. I had this furniture as Young... Where are you buy it

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  4. hello, I am from Czech republic. Not very surprising to me, that it was a copy of western product. Socialistic countries did not care about western copyrights. It was produced since 1988.

    Frantisek

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