Joe with his ‘Modernist’ lamp at Timothy Hatton Architects
Designer Joe Armitage hails from a British design dynasty. His great-grandfather Joseph was a renowned stone carver and his grandfather Edward was a prominent modernist architect, who not only designed buildings, but also created a sculptural floor lamp from rosewood and scrap materials when working in India in 1952.
Both Joe’s aunt and uncle are architects, while his grandmother, of whom Joe is fiercely proud, is the wallpaper designer Marthe Armitage – known for her intricate, hand-drawn botanical prints. To say design is in the blood is an understatement. ‘I have four generations to live up to,’ he says.
Joe, a former design director for sustainable lighting company Tala, began his own journey as a solo creative in 2021 by refining his grandfather’s 1952 lamp and building a sustainable product line – the ‘Armitage’ collection – around it.
‘My grandmother, who is my inspiration, suggested I redesign the lamp, which was, at the time, in her living room. That was the start of everything,’ he says. ‘That first collection was about honouring my grandfather’s legacy using the same design DNA. But, by the time I created the ‘Noveconi’ chandelier [2023] for the Nilufar gallery, I had done him justice and felt I could pursue my own creative freedom.’
Like his grandmother, Joe creates designs that are rooted in nature. ‘I take the inspiration less literally, focusing on structural simplicity and the way that plants are formed using mathematics, such as the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence,’ he says. ‘Lighting for me is functional sculpture.’
