Makers
Louis Craig Carpenter
Woodturner & Furniture Maker
Grandeys Place, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire
Woodturner & Furniture Maker
Grandeys Place, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire
A printmaker who found his craft in wood - turning bowls and furniture, and the stands that hold the globes made upstairs.
Louis Craig Carpenter is a woodturner and furniture maker - and yes, that is his real surname. He came to wood the long way round. He trained first as an illustrator and worked in printmaking, producing fine-art screenprint editions for artists and galleries alongside his own illustrative work. It was that, he says - the eye for fine detail and the sheer physicality of pulling prints - that led him to the lathe and the bench.
He learned his woodwork turning globe stands at Bellerby & Co, the London globemakers, then spent time producing furniture for the London studio Wilkinson & Rivera before setting up on his own. His own work runs in a quiet, considered register - he points to Scandinavian and Japanese design - and takes in furniture as well as turned bowls and centrepieces. In 2023 he took space at Grandeys Place, the craft centre in the Hertfordshire countryside, and set his bench up on the ground floor.
The shop is a woodturner’s shop: a lathe, a bandsaw, a pillar drill, a wall of chisels and mallets, timber stacked to season. He reads a board before he cuts it, the way any good maker does, and works it down to the clean turned forms that are his signature.
The reason Louis is at Grandeys Place, though, is upstairs. The globemaker Jonathan Wright works the floor above, and Louis makes the bespoke wooden stands his globes sit in - the turned legs, the broad horizon ring that carries the calendar, the cradle the sphere turns in - as well as helping restore the stands of the antique globes that come through. A globe is only half an object without the thing that holds it, and that half is his.
It is a real partnership, and a neat one: both men trained at Bellerby & Co before reuniting under one roof, Jonathan making the spheres, Louis making the structures. Wright invited him into the space, and the work meets in the middle - made upstairs, cradled downstairs, finished as one piece. It is, frankly, how the archive thinks craft ought to go: two makers who found each other, each doing the half they do best.
This is the archive’s first record of Louis Craig Carpenter, made in his workshop at Grandeys Place in May 2026: the route from print to wood, the turned bowls and the furniture, and the globe stands that make him half of one of the best small partnerships the archive has found. The England Archive sets out to celebrate exactly this - craftspeople who find each other and work together, each craft the stronger for the company of the other.
