We talk about the furniture of Jiří Jiroutek A LOT so we felt it high time to shine a spotlight on the man himself. Here’s a wee homage to one of our favourite Czech furniture designers ever.
Photo credit: David Turecký
Jiří Jiroutek is a Czech furniture and interior designer whose renown culls from his midcentury tenure at Interier Praha, during which he orchestrated the firm’s famed U-450 series of modular sideboards—today, perhaps the leading exemplar of Czech “Brussels Style” furniture.
Born in 1928, Jiroutek completed his professional studies at Prague’s Academy of Applied Arts and began his career at the newly created Interier Praha Company.
On the heels of early successes, Jiroutek became the head of design in 1958 and soon after began work on the U-450 series. The designs were heavily inspired by the watershed ’58 Expo in Brussels, which moved Czech post-war design generally toward “softer” modernism—one characterised by pastel colours, new geometries, and the use of modern materials like engineered composites, glass, and concrete. Jiroutek became know especially for the simple morphologies of oak-veneered sideboards and cabinets with sleekly colour-block sliding doors and drawers.
Immensely popular, the U-450 series pushed Jiroutek and, subsequently, Interier Praha to focus mainly on the large-scale production of modular furniture.
In the autumn of 1968, Jiroutek met Ingvar Kamprad, who was on a business trip in Czechoslovakia. He offered him a place in the center of his Swedish company IKEA. Jiří accepted the position abroad and for the next three years worked on the proper introduction of the so-called ‘project documentation’, which would enable the easy transport of furniture in boxes and its subsequent assembly direct in the living room of the consumer. After his return to Communist Czechoslovakia, Jiroutek was unable to continue working as a designer (due to a jealousy of some in the Communist Party) . He therefore took up the position of a clerk at Ligna Company and later moved to the Foreign Trade Department and began organising furniture exhibitions throughout Europe. Jiri Jiroutek still lives and is designing to this day in his Prague studio.
Some words taken from Design Addict and Lidovky.
