Count's kitchens

Setting prices for kitchens is a complicated thing. The final cost of the set will depend not so much on the size of the kitchen, but on the complexity of the design: the number of drawers, shelves, decorations, accessories and other things. (Photo: Yuri Feklistov )

The Graf furniture factory is located about an hour’s drive from Voronezh. The Voronezh-Tambov highway leads there, the first Russian toll road that I happened to drive on: in the middle of the highway, barriers and a booth with a cashier suddenly appear. There are practically no cars, travel for a passenger car costs only one ruble - the director of the plant, Valentin Stepanov, laughs: they say, the cashier here doesn’t even collect her own salary.

Signs with the inscription “Count's Kitchens” are prudently hung along the highway so that customers do not get lost. They come here often - ordering furniture directly from the company is cheaper than in a store.

The enterprise has existed for 75 years, at first it was an artel, then a timber mill, then a woodworking plant, which was transformed into a furniture plant only in 1975. Since then, only kitchen furniture has been produced here. In Soviet times, this was the only plastic model. At that time no one thought about expanding the range. 60 percent of the products were sold in Voronezh and neighboring regions of the Black Earth Region, the rest went to Ukraine.

About a year before 1993, while the commodity shortage persisted, mass production also remained intact, but the sales geography expanded - the products went to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Urals, right up to Sakhalin. Then imports poured in, and it was not furniture that was in short supply, but money. And those who had them tried to buy foreign cuisine.

Then the plant realized that they had to fight for the consumer. They began to slowly introduce new models - they traveled abroad, got acquainted with local production, and paid attention to the design. By 1994, the flow of similar products was removed, they even eliminated the warehouse of finished products and began working on individual orders.

Now the plant produces 700-800 sets of furniture per month, which is half as much as in Soviet times. Last year, compared to 1998, production in monetary terms increased 1.8 times (slightly more than the industry as a whole), and in physical terms - by 10%. They mainly work with plastic, of which there are always 30 types in stock, but a particularly discerning buyer can choose from 500 types of plastic, but they will have to wait longer until it is discharged from Italy. At the plant, they can make the doors of shelves, drawers and bedside tables paneled, from natural oak, but such orders are few - only one such set caught my eye in the workshop. Valentin Stepanov says that 99% of customers prefer plastic - it is more practical and cheaper, and oak doors are 20 percent more expensive.

In the workshops, where you can go through the entire technological chain - from the blanks to the finished product - there is a smell of hot wood dust, but you can’t see it on the floor - it’s clean. From large sheets of chipboard, blanks are first cut - parts of future shelves, bedside tables, drawers. Then, under a press, they are pasted over with the plastic chosen by the customer, the edges are lined - a thin plastic tape is glued to the end. The customer's name is scratched on each part with a pencil or felt-tip pen so as not to be confused. “Heirloom” parts of the future kitchen travel from workshop to workshop, where workers work magic on them - drilling holes for handles and hinges, gluing decorative golden edgings, and so on, until it comes to packaging. On the packages there are inscriptions like “Ivanova - Tambov” or the names of the trading companies through which the order was received. Every week, furniture is sent by car to customers, and they are transported not only to nearby regions, but also to Moscow, Volgograd, and Nizhny Novgorod.

Here they learned how to make semicircular “facade elements”, that is, doors. They can be convex or concave. However, ordinary chipboard, of course, cannot be bent like that. They don’t want to tell us the secret - how and what oval doors are made of - they say that this is their know-how. In the workshop we found several blanks for such doors - in special molds there is something like a layer cake: sheets of plywood and something in between. Lena, who is accompanying us from the production department, waves her hands at the photographer - you can’t, you can’t take pictures.

As with most furniture enterprises that are trying to make their products competitive, they cannot do without the use of imported materials. Equipment for particularly delicate and complex work is also imported. The director of the plant says that they are constantly trying to find suppliers of materials and accessories in Russia, but this is still difficult. It seems that somewhere in Kaluga they can make golden edgings, the Kostroma plywood mill has mastered the production of moisture-resistant chipboard for tabletops (they were previously purchased in England).

Most often, the cost of one order ranges from 10 to 25 thousand rubles (only furniture, without household appliances). Expensive furniture worth thousands of 100 rubles is rarely ordered; apparently, wealthy people still prefer to buy foreign kitchens. For Voronezh customers, furniture assembly services are included in the price; in other cities they are assembled for an additional fee.

According to director Valentin Stepanov, the growth in domestic furniture production is due to a sharp post-crisis reduction in imports. This is something to be happy about, but to maintain the upward trend, you must be prepared for competition. “The requirements for quality will inevitably increase further, because people want to live better,” he says.