narmebel.ru was the site of a Nizhny Novgorod furniture factory, "Narodnaya Mebel" (People's Furniture), which later operated under the name of the "Myagkoye Mesto" (Soft Place) chain of showrooms. The nn.ru directory describes the resource in a single line: production of upholstered and cabinet furniture in Nizhny Novgorod[1]. The earliest snapshot of the catalogue card is dated 25 April 2002[1], the latest furniture-related snapshot in our collection is dated 12 August 2011[2], and by August 2020 the address carried a listing offering the domain for sale[3].

Listing in the nn.ru directory

The earliest trace of the site in our materials is not the site itself but its listing in the directory of the "Nizhny Novgorod OnLine" portal. In a snapshot from 25 April 2002, the factory appears under "Firms (Enterprises)" → "Furniture and Interior Items" as "'Narodnaya Mebel' furniture factory" with a rating of 40.91 — third in the list[1].

It did not stop at one category: by September 2002 the same address with the same description also appeared in two other sections of the catalogue — "Consumer Goods, Stores" → "Production"[4] and "Consumer Goods, Stores" → "Stores"[5]; the rating in both snapshots was 275. In "Production" the listing stood second, behind only the site of the Nizhny Novgorod Fat-and-Oil Combine[4], and in "Stores" it stood first[5].

"Myagkoye Mesto": what the site looked like

By 2011 the address narmebel.ru served a site titled "Myagkoye Mesto:: chain of furniture showrooms". The menu comprised nine items: "News", "Choosing Furniture", "Product Catalogue", "Where to Buy", "Installment Plan", "Wholesale Sales", "Feedback", "Vacancies", and, standing out from the furniture theme, "Loggia Finishing"[2].

Instead of a description of the product range, the home page carried a message to the visitor written in a pointedly conversational tone: as the home page put it, the company considered its distinguishing feature to be "normal human relations with every customer, in a word — SOFT RELATIONS"[2]. The same page listed related services — delivery and installment plans; the text was written in the voice of the team, which included both delivery staff and the factory's management[2]. The footer of the page credits the people behind it: the engine is listed as Powered by New Technologies, and the site design is credited to the "Yabloko" design studio[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The nn.ru catalogue is one of the sources by which we reconstruct the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s. The rating that the directory displayed next to the listing rose from 40.91 in April 2002[1] to 275 in September of the same year[4] and to 479 in a snapshot from 25 July 2003. In that snapshot, the "Furniture and Interior Items" section is sorted by rating, and "Narodnaya Mebel" stands second: above it only a portal on real estate, construction, furniture, and renovation with a rating of 944, and below it 282, 92, 79, and further descending[6]. Within its own category the site held its place near the top: third in April 2002[1] and second in July 2003[6].

The site did have a counter: next to the listing, the directory placed a link to Counter.nn.ru with number 2819[1][6]. But in the samples of the counter itself that we have preserved, no separate line for narmebel.ru was recorded — the site's trace survives only in the portal's catalogue sections (the method and boundaries of this sample are described in the article "Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating"). In the surviving results table of the "Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day" 2004 competition, neither the address narmebel.ru nor the factory's name appears[7].

How it closed

Between the August snapshots of 2011 and 2015, the furniture site at this address disappeared. In a snapshot from 1 August 2015, the address narmebel.ru serves an entirely unrelated resource — the page of the engineering consulting center "Promtekhbezopasnost'" (Industrial Safety), an organization founded in March 1998 with a network of 19 branches and representative offices across Russian regions, with no connection to furniture whatsoever[8]. By August 2020 the domain was listed for sale through the REG.RU domain store: the placeholder page offered the name for 9,900 rubles and listed a price of 123 dollars[3].

After that the domain dropped out of use: in our register it is marked as non-existent. The web archive holds around eighty snapshots of the home page, the most recent dated 2 March 2025[9]. Neither phone numbers nor showroom addresses appear on the surviving home page from 2011: judging by the menu, they lived on the internal "Where to Buy" page, which is not present in our set of snapshots. What survives of the "Myagkoye Mesto" chain is the menu, the message to visitors, and a line in the Nizhny Novgorod directory.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Furniture and Interior Items" section, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2011 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2020 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Production" section, 2002 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Stores" section, 2002 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Furniture and Interior Items" section, sorted by rating, 2003 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, 2004 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — Home page, 2015 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org (archive)