Mid-Century Stuhl von Jiří Jiroutek, 1960er

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Born sometime around 1912 or 1913 (his specific birth date remains unpublished), Jiroutek spent his adolescence in the provincial Bohemia town of Chrudim, where he attended secondary school. Like seminal Czech industrial designer Jindrich Halabala, Jiroutek completed his professional studies at Prague’s Academy of Applied Arts (today, the Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design). In 1951, Jiroutek began his career at the just-born Interier Praha. In contrast to Halabala and the other midcentury Czech modernists, Jiroutek, it seems, never worked for the other prominent national furniture manufacturers like TON, and UP Závody. 

On the heels of early successes, Jiroutek became the head of design at Interier Praha 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 postwar design generally toward a “softer” modernism—one characterized by pastel colors, 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 color-blocked 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. Onward into the 1970s—even after the design-stunting Prague Spring in 1968—Jiroutek continued to add new editions to his already robust oeuvre, contributing opaline glass tables, and armchairs, as well as entire kitchen suites (his KU-550 series) and living room suites (his U-550 series) sets to Interier Praha’s catalogue.

UP Závody—an acronym for Czech furniture manufacturer Spojené uměleckoprůmyslové závody (or, Associated Arts & Crafts Enterprises, in English)—was founded in Brno in 1920, following a merger of enterprises started by Jan Vaněk and Karel Slavíček. Initially comprising woodworkers who chiefly produced cabinetry, the company broadened its offering in the late 1920s to include an entire range of home furnishings, following the directive of the firm’s fresh-faced and precocious development director, Jindrich Halabala, who led the company’s product promotion and sales strategy until 1946.

Believing that furniture should be fully functional, modular, mobile, and widely affordable, Halabala—who also designed for Thonet—advocated for a new mass-market approach to Czech furnishing. To that end, he designed and produced an UP Závody catalogue that included chairs , tables , sideboards , dressers , couches , lamps , and more, all influenced by the aesthetics of Czech Cubism, Art Déco, and European modernism. During the 1930s, he developed the H and E modular series, as well as various types of wooden and tubular steel pieces inspired by Bauhaus designers Mart Stam (1899-1986) and Marcel Breuer (1902-1981). These cantilevered designs, which were fabricated in UP's Hodonín branch, are highly sought-after today on the vintage market.

On the heels of Halabala’s success, by 1937, UP had grown into Europe’s largest furniture manufacturer—with a reputation synonymous with good taste and quality. The company’s clout continued to widen internationally, even with the onset of the Second World War. After the war, however, UP was nationalized, which forced the company to focus more on quantity than quality. Although UP remained active throughout the latter half of the 20^th century, this dilution of its foundational commitment to serial designs of the highest grade ensured the company’s fade from design relevance—a wither exemplified by the lack of late-century UP work on the vintage market.

In 1992, UP merged with fellow Czech furniture manufacturer Tusculum Rousínov to become Tusculum a.s., which, in the early oughts, became absorbed by Jitona, currently one of the five largest suppliers of veneered furniture for Ikea Europe.