Picasso Chairs and Playful Precision: Josh Page’s Creative World

Josh Page is a designer who doesn’t start with plans. He starts with what’s at hand: a split in a plank, a leftover piece of plywood, a shape half-drawn in pencil then rubbed out again. In a small but finely tuned garden workshop in his garden in Kent, he produces carved lamps, sculptural sconces and quietly imaginative furniture – objects that feel, in his words, “somewhere between the practical and the poetic.” After years of balancing his practice with work at the National Gallery, he recently made the leap to focus solely on his own designs and now his eponymous studio has become his full-time pursuit.

That shift marks a new chapter, but traces of the gallery linger in his work. “It gave me such a solid foundation,” he says. “Watching master framers – how they handled tools, how they approached a corner or a curve. That’s all stayed with me.” It was there that he first learnt to gild, a skill he now uses in pieces like the Shocking Chair, where oil-gilded surfaces catch and scatter light. “The gallery was all about precision,” he adds. “But what I’ve carried with me is less the rules, more the eye for detail.”

Page began making in childhood. “I’ve always made things,” he says, recalling afternoons in his dad’s shed and helping his dad, also a woodworker, build boats. Though he later studied fine art and worked in framing, it wasn’t until formative encounters with Picasso paintings in New York and Paris that something shifted. “Seeing those pieces up close gave me a weird buzz,” he says. “It was like going to a gig and coming out energised. I came home and felt compelled to make something that responded to what I saw.”

The first result of that was the Picasso chair, built with his father. Since then, chairs have become a kind of recurring fascination. “I’ve got a bit of an obsession,” he admits. “Because they sit in that sweet spot between sculpture and function. But I don’t want to make something that’s too perfect. I want it to feel alive.”

Indeed, imperfection is central to Page’s practice. He actively seeks out flawed or overlooked pieces of wood: cherry with knots, offcuts from shelving commissions, planks that have sat unsold at his local timber yards for years. “I’ll sketch and sketch,” he says, “but a design often doesn’t really come to life until I’ve got the material in front of me. Sometimes the material tells you what it wants to be.” And Josh encourages owners of his pieces to have the same willingness to let materials be themselves: “You can’t control how a piece ages,” he says. “But that’s the point. It keeps evolving.”

This tactile, responsive approach plays out across many of his pieces. Leftover sheets of teak plywood became the seed of the Acid Lamp series, which comprises blocks of the material that Josh carves to form patterns from the layers of wood, then pairs with custom-made shades made by a local maker. Recently, he has begun evolving this series by lacquering and foiling the wood before freely carving out grooves with a chisel to create impressions that catch the light. “Lighting has become this whole new thing for me,” he explains. “It’s more accessible than furniture, and light adds a whole new dimension to an object. The way it hits a surface can completely change how you see it.”

With his work at the gallery no longer in the picture, he’s found space for deeper focus, and more freedom to follow ideas as they arise. “I usually have a few things going at once,” he says. “If I get stuck on one, I’ll move to something else. The good ideas tend to come fast, but that’s also when I have to be careful. I’ll rush them, and then lose interest. So it’s about holding onto the excitement but working with patience.”

Among recent works is a bench made for a friend using ash and yew gathered near their home. The original design had four identical legs, but short on timber, Page built the fourth differently, using sapwood and bark to create a more sculptural form. “It ended up being my favourite part,” he says. “And I never would have drawn it that way.”

Some pieces are more personal still. A small wooden chair made for his young son, Maxwell, includes a carved “M” initial, and was built to be as tactile as possible to invite discovery. “It’s not just something he can use, it’s something he can experience,” Page says. And that child-like sense of play is apparent in his furniture designed for adults too, as seen in the Apple Chair – a beautifully made chair with an apple carved from beech resting on one of the joints, created for Flawk’s project in Stoke Newington. “I want the things I make to invite touch, to be lived with,” says Josh. 

Josh’s practice feels rooted in something slow and deeply felt. There’s an openness to its ethos – room for change, for experimentation, for things to go slightly off-track. It’s there in the exposed grain of the wood, the mix of materials, the light spilling through a handmade shape in a sconce. “I’m learning to let go,” Page says, “to not overthink it. That’s when the good stuff happens.”