comelfo.ru — the website of the "Komilfo" (Comme il faut) upholstered furniture collection, known from a web-archive snapshot dated June 3, 2002[1]. In the directory of nn.ru — a catalogue of Nizhny Novgorod websites — the "Comme il faut" listing, described as "The 'Komilfo' upholstered furniture collection," sat in the category "Companies (Enterprises): Furniture and Home Furnishings" among Nizhny Novgorod furniture factories, and its rating linked to the counter at Counter.nn.ru, where the site corresponded to number 10055[4].

A showcase for a single collection

The 2002 home page was arranged not as a product catalogue but as a short literary introduction. At the top stood an epigraph from Marcus Aurelius — that one should not be content with a superficial view of things; below it came an explanation of the name: "Komilfo is a word from Russia's Golden Age," as the home page put it, and the collection was addressed to people who were recreating that Golden Age[1].

The items were not called by model numbers but by names, and the page gave an explanation for each: the sofas "Mécène" and "Soirée," "Mirabelle," "Vicomte," "Étoile," "Bon ton," "Miracle," "Alcazar," "Versailles," "Lancier," "Nocturne," "Paladin," "Papillon"[1]. There was no showroom address, no phone number, and no company name on the home page — the entire navigation fit into three links: "where to buy?," "view prices," "ask the specialists a question"[1].

Trace of the owner

The only indication of who owned the collection survived in the page's service section: in the list of keywords, alongside the model names and the words "furniture, elite, upholstered, sofa," stood "Slavyansky Dvor"[1]. In the same category of the nn.ru catalogue, in July 2003, there was a listing "The firms 'Slavyansky Dvor' and 'Smeraldo'" with the address smeraldo.nnov.ru[2]. It cannot be asserted from a single keyword that the site belonged to precisely this firm, but no other traces of the owner appear in the material.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site's visibility is measurable: in the "Furniture and Home Furnishings" category, which spanned three pages of roughly two and a half dozen listings each, the counter showed Comme il faut at 36 points on July 8, 2003[2], 51 points on July 25[3], and 54 points on September 19 of the same year[4]. By autumn the site had risen to fifth place on the first page of the category sorted by rating — ahead of it were the "Metr.Ru" portal (599), the "Narodnaya Mebel" factory (460), the firm "Falcor" (269), and "MobiDi" (147), and right behind it, the "Myagkaya Liniya" furniture factory (51)[4]. By comparison, in the July snapshot the order was different, with "Myagkaya Liniya" at 79 points standing higher[3]. This is a typical position for an industry showcase in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s: notably smaller than the portal, but above the middle of the category. The figures are taken from the same dataset underlying the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

The fate of the address

By the snapshot of December 17, 2014, the collection was no longer on the domain: comelfo.ru held an empty content management system installation, labeled "Open Source Content Management," where the only content was a "Home" heading, an empty main menu, and a login form with the links "Forgot your password?" and "Registration"[5]. There are no substantive versions of the site between 2002 and 2014 in our material, and the 2014 snapshot shows only one thing: the content had disappeared from the domain, while the address itself remained occupied by an empty template.

After that, the domain went up for sale. In the snapshot of March 14, 2022, comelfo.ru held a REG.RU domain marketplace page: the heading "Domain comelfo.ru is for sale," a price of 9,900 rubles (123 dollars in the header), and an offer to contact the seller by mobile phone or via the "VKontakte" widget[6]. By December 7, 2023, the page had not changed, except that the currency price in the header had dropped to 99 dollars[7]. The snapshot of December 7, 2023 is the most recent one available to us in the web archive. When checked in August 2026, the site at this address was responding.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Furniture and Home Furnishings" category, July 8, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, rating category, July 25, 2003 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, rating category, September 19, 2003 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2014 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Domain sale page, 2022 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Domain sale page, 2023 (archive)