Collection of industrial heritage

The majority of the collection is composed of the Eta factory donation to the Svit in 2014, when the department at Bakovnik was closed where ‘majolicas’, one of the most recognizable Kamnik souvenirs,  were made and painted. We gained 350 objects – majolicas, smaller tools, files/folders with button patterns, spindle/mandrel, pictorial material (photographs, catalogues, books), smaller materials from the work stations of model builders and painters etc. There are also older majolicas and decorative plates in the collection which where made in the Schnabel workshop at the beginning of the 20^th century, as well as newer ones painted by such contemporary arstists as Miha Maleš, Dušan Lipovec, Klavdij Tutta and others.

This collection was started at the museum in 1967 as a result of cooperation with the Stol factory in Duplica, which had found a role in collecting, purchasing and presenting the works of their predecessors, Ivan Bahovec’s factory of curved furniture and Vladimir Remc’s factory. In that time curator Mirina Zupančič acquired a collection of the first 78 museum objects by keeping a record of the most beautiful samples of Thonet’s furniture and buying them from Slovene furniture factories. The collection includes various types of chairs, benches, coffee tables, rocking-chairs, clothes-hangers, bed sides and upholstered furniture, as well as cast-iron panels for pattern printing, iron bending templates and the factory catalogue of products. Some models of Thonet’s chairs were produced up to the nineteen nineties. The tradition had been continued by designers Niko Kralj and Branko Uršič, in their own special way.