Meet the successors to a very British design dynasty

“I call it The Compound,” says architect and designer Joe Armitage, getting off his motorbike on a residential street in west London. He leads me through an inconspicuous garage door and into a lawned garden dotted with spring flowers. A 400-year-old quince and mulberry stand guard at the rear of a tall, two-fronted house overlooking the River Thames.

Four generations of the Armitage family have lived for almost a century in a group of houses on this plot: a small British dynasty of designers and craftsmen. The original house, known as Number One, built in 1600 and extensively modified in 1790, was purchased by the late Yorkshire-born architectural sculptor Joseph Armitage in 1930. The work of Armitage and his equipment has appeared on public buildings in London and New Delhi, including India House, South Africa House and the reconstructed Bank of England, although its most recognizable design is the National Trust’s oak leaf logo.

Armitage’s son, Edward, was a modernist architect who designed a hospital in Ludhiana in India. He married Marthe Armitage, whose family had moved into a neighboring house (into one of two houses built by Joseph, known as Number Four and Five) when she was nine. Marthe became a distinguished designer of hand-drawn wallpapers and fabrics, her work becoming more widely discovered when she was in her 70s. She is now 93 years old and her studio, run by her daughter, Jo Broadhurst, is thriving.

Today, the family legacy is also carried on by his grandson Joe. An architect by training and former design director of the Tala lighting brand, he began redesigning (at Marthe’s request) a distinctive floor lamp first made by Edward in 1952 when the couple lived in India. That lamp has now evolved into a collection of floor, accent, suspension, and wall lights (available through SCP and future perfect). The latest addition, a chandelier, was unveiled at Nilufar during this year’s Milan Design Week.

As he and his grandmother sit over coffee and mid-morning scones at Number Two’s dining room table (separated from Number One after Joseph’s death), Joe is contemplative. “It wasn’t until I finished university that I realized that design was a profession, it was just what my family did. I grew up surrounded by all this stuff: ‘That’s what Grandma designed. That’s Grandpa… He was such a part of our identity that I didn’t realize it was an industry.”

There is nothing worse than being a passionate and married artist

With its high ceilings, generous proportions, and centuries-old patina, Number Two has a Bloomsbury, or perhaps Armitage, feel to it. A portrait of a stern-looking Joseph hangs above the table, and one of his ornate cabinets sits in one corner. A chair in a textile floral design by Edward sits next to an upholstered sofa in one of Marthe’s, while the fireplace surround is a Soane from the former Bank of England. Several walls are covered with Marthe’s papers: Solomon Seal is based on a plant that grows in the garden, and another is called Windmill, for obvious reasons. In an upstairs room, Joe points out the sweet male and female figures depicted in the design that he says are his grandparents.

Marthe grew up on Number Four, and many decades later, so did Joe. In the 1950s, she and Edward built another house on the same row, known as Number Seven. After Joseph’s death, they moved into Number One. Now, 83 years after she first settled here, she lives across the garden in a sunlit sanctuary converted from the old garage building. . Bright paintings of both hers and friends line the walls, along with family photographs and clippings including a photograph of Marthe at The Art Workers’ Guild, where she was a Master, with the now King, while another shows her when she was younger. . crouched over a manual printer. “That’s me writing on the floor, just like I used to,” she says cheerfully. “I got the press in the 60s, so I would have been 30 years old. It was hard, physical work to print wallpaper by hand.”

Marthe was one of the few women to attend the Chelsea School of Art in the 1940s. “They didn’t take us seriously,” she says. “We were all expected to get married, but there’s really nothing worse than being a really passionate artist and being married.” Her plan to be a wife, mother and artist failed. “I found that babies and painting just didn’t go together because you need to completely isolate yourself when painting. He demands everything,” she recalls. “You have brought these children into the world and they have to come first. So Edward earned the money and I got the house.”

Even later, when the children left home, Edward preferred that she not paint because he found her too distant when she worked. “He had a room at the top of the house and he couldn’t stand it,” she says. “Interestingly, when my mother was widowed at the age of 68, she began to draw, never having picked up a pencil in her entire life. She joined an art class in Essex and spent the rest of her life painting. She told me, ‘I couldn’t have done this when dad was alive, he would have stood on his head.’

It was during the couple’s two years in India that Edward began making furniture, including the floor lamp, from Indian rosewood and reclaimed materials. With its long, sloping wooden stem and tapered shade, it is almost in the shape of a bird. One of the three originals brought to England is in Marthe’s house. “You can see it’s very close together,” Joe says, examining the back of the lamp. “That is the lid of a paint can and some motorcycle radios. It was more or less things that he found ”. Marthe chimes in: “Because we used and reused everything in those days. Even paper bags.

Joe is thoughtful. “My great-grandfather did all these decorative things and Grandma’s wallpapers are also very decorative, but the lamp comes from modernist thinking. It’s a little more mid-century Brazilian than European. I guess he is mid-century Indian, Anglo-Indian!

India also proved to be a source of inspiration for Marthe, who remembers watching local artisans at a bazaar: “There were guys printing bedspreads on the side of the road on a big table with woodblocks applied with some stain and applied to the top of the road. fabric. It was a bit hit and miss. That stayed with me. I realized what was possible,” she says.

Back in England, Marthe found space on a landing and began making her own wallpaper, first for her home and then for her friends, before gathering a few loyal customers. “I felt like it was secondary to fine art, but I knew in my heart that it was a good job.” Precise, intricate, romantic, fantastic and full of stories, her designs were inspired by the plants along the river. “It’s nice to lie in bed or sit in the bathroom and think about the images,” she says of the illustrations.

In 2004, the wallpaper manufacturer hamilton-weston he took up Marthe’s designs and interest in her grew. At an event held at her house, someone asked about the floor lamp and she told them her story. “The next day, Grandma knocked on the door,” Joe says. “She said, ‘I have 20 orders for that old lamp for you.’ She literally threw me to the bottom.”

And delve into the family history: although Joe no longer lives with the family, but settles on the other side of central London, it was in the annexe of the house that his great-grandfather first lived, encouraged by his grandmother, who began to carve a renewed version of the lamp. It seems that this strong sense of place, rootedness, only breeds more creativity. “In a family that has stayed in this same place for four generations, artistic production is the product of all the emotion that comes from it,” he says.

Before I leave, Joe reexamines the figures from his grandmother’s design, the Gardeners. “It’s you and Grandpa, isn’t it?” he asks Marta. She purses her lips and smiles. “Well, it wasn’t, but that’s the story now.”