The theme of this year's Designblok festival is JOURNEY. And we’ll be presenting our own journey, full of adventure, fragrant wood, and bright colours, with the new XYLONAUT building set.
Visitors of the Designblok festival can find us on the mezzanine of the National Gallery’s Trade Fair Palace in Prague from October 4 to 8. We will present the XYLONAUT building set – a set of hand-crafted and hand-painted building blocks created with all generations in mind. Youngest children can learn colours and build towers, older kids can explore geometric shapes, and we have an instruction sheet with 54 original motifs for everyone to build. A car, an ice cream, a space rocket, an earthworm? You can try them all.
Just like with BRIKULO, our previous building set, our designer Pavla drew inspiration from geometry. This time around, she worked with mirroring and symmetry to create a colourful, stimulating toy that encourages action: play, build, discover. XYLONAUT’s blocks are painted with geometric shapes in six distinctive hues, contrasting with the wood’s natural grain. No two blocks in the set are the same, and assembling the motifs helps boost your fine motor skills as well as logical thinking, no matter your age.
• • •
You might remember the first XYLONAUT prototype from the 2021 Designblok festival! Since then, we have been fine-tuning the toy and preparing it for certification and serial production. We have designed the packaging and secured a local carpenter to hand-craft the blocks, which we then hand-paint ourselves. We also got to enjoy long hours of testing, building, and designing the motifs.
You can discover the result at this year’s Designblok, and also through a series of photographs taken in the garden where Pavla has been creating and inventing since she was little. Just like the building set itself, Adriána Vančová’s photos build on the idea of holidays in the country, strolling in nature during the day and playing or talking with siblings, parents, and grandparents in the evening. Of time spent crafting and creating.
To us, XYLONAUT represents a return to childhood. To playfulness, joy, imagination, and discovery.
XYLONAUT is suitable for children from one year of age, handmade in the Czech Republic, and you can purchase it right here.
