Marthe Armitage Prints X Sigmar

At this year’s London Design Festival, Marthe Armitage Prints is teaming up with antique dealer and design studio Sigmar to introduce Lobby, a previously unseen multi-coloured wallpaper pattern from the artist Marthe Armitage’s design archive, remastered and printed for the first time on fabric. The event, taking place within the Brompton Design District, is a teaser of what’s to come in Spring 24 when the multi-coloured collection will be launched. A 1940s Kaare Klint designer sofa upholstered in Lobby will be presented in the window of Sigmar’s gallery and studio in the King’s Road. The shopfront display will be accompanied by complementary products from Marthe Armitage Prints’ wider range - including wide-width digital papers and coordinating screen printed fabrics made up into limited edition cushions. About the Lobby design: Marthe originally conceived Lobby as a three-block lino print in the 1980’s; as she intended it to be printed on the floor, and not on the press, she was able to explore a much freer style of drawing – and the result is a graphic and powerful botanical pattern featuring intertwining hydrangea flowers, leaves and ferns. The design takes its name from the lobby of Marthe's Georgian riverside family home in Strand-on-the-Green, where it was first hung, and where Marthe’s daughter Jo Broadhurst now lives. Lobby is more complex than Marthe’s other botanical designs, and as she explains, “It’s the only three-block design I’ve ever created. Three blocks and three colours. And it started out as a floor block. So - it was a nightmare to print! But I printed it in sheets and not in a roll. And it was an enormous block. I had to do it three times, and then of course choosing the colours was incredibly difficult. There is some overprinting so actually you get five colours created out of three blocks.” Marthe’s daughter Jo - who now runs the business and carries on the tradition of hand-printing - has always loved Lobby and has long been looking for a way to bring it back into production. The original method of printing on the floor produces a particularly rich surface texture, and the overprinting of three lino blocks creates a unique colour interplay - both features that can be beautifully rendered with hand screen printing. Lobby, shown here in ‘Fauve’ colourway, printed on a richly textured linen, will be at the heart of the multi-coloured fabric range, a new and exciting extension to the Marthe Armitage Prints collection.