Event Florists for Parties and Celebrations

Event florists who design and install, not just deliver

Most event florists will deliver boxed arrangements to a venue and leave. That is fine for a dinner at home. It does not work for a room that has to be turned around in ninety minutes between a lunch booking and your guests arriving. We design the scheme, agree the bump in window with the venue, and put people on site to place and adjust it.

Event flowers by occasion

Occasion changes the brief more than the guest count does. A christening wants restraint and light tones near the font. A fortieth in a warehouse wants scale, because the room will eat anything small. A baby shower is photographed from above at a table, so the arrangements need to look right from the top, which most do not.

Flowers for events, intimate to large scale

The arrangement count follows the guest count, but not in a straight line. Below about 30 guests you are usually decorating one table and one entry. Above about 80, the room itself needs anchoring, and that is where a single larger feature earns more than spreading the same budget thinly across every surface.

Engagement party flowers

Engagement flowers are the one occasion where couples often want a preview of the wedding scheme. That is worth doing deliberately: use the same palette at a smaller scale, so the two events read as connected without the engagement giving the whole thing away.

Baby shower flowers

Baby shower flowers sit low, get photographed from directly above, and often share the table with a grazing board. Low, wide and slightly loose works. Anything tall competes with the food and gets moved.

Christening flowers

Churches set their own rules about fixings, candles and what can be left after the service. We confirm those with the parish before designing rather than after, which avoids the arrangement that cannot legally be attached to the pew it was built for.

Milestone birthdays and anniversaries

A significant birthday or anniversary is usually the largest private event a family plans, and it is the one where the room does most of the work. Two things separate the ones that land from the ones that feel like a function.

The first is a single strong idea rather than several competing ones. One colour, one dominant variety, repeated at different scales, reads as designed. Four ideas at equal weight reads as a hire catalogue.

The second is personalisation that is not literal. A guest of honour who gardens does not need a sign about gardening. They need the varieties from their garden on the tables, which almost nobody notices consciously and everybody notices.

Corporate parties and client events

A company Christmas party, an awards night or a client function is a private event with a corporate run sheet, which changes two things. The venue timetable is set by someone other than you, usually AV, and the florals have to survive being loaded in around a rig rather than into an empty room.

The practical answer is fewer, larger pieces placed after the technical bump in, rather than many small pieces that get moved by three different crews before guests arrive. Where a business runs recurring functions, we scope them together, which is covered on our corporate florals page.

Working with what the venue already has

Most function venues own vases, stands, plinths and sometimes candelabras, and most will lend them at no charge. Very few volunteer this. Asking changes the quote, because vessel hire is a real line and a supplied vessel removes it.

• Ask what vases and vessels the venue holds, in what sizes and how many. Ten matching vases is a meaningful saving.
• Ask whether there are plinths, easels or stands that can carry a feature piece.
• Ask what is already in the room. A venue with strong existing greenery or a feature wall needs less, not more.
• Ask about lighting. A room lit warm will flatten cool toned flowers, and it is easier to change the flowers than the lighting rig.
• Ask who clears the tables at the end and where arrangements go. If nobody has decided, they end up in a bin.

Where the florals actually get seen

Event budgets are usually spread evenly around a room, and that is almost always the wrong distribution. Guests do not look at a room evenly. They queue, they stand, they photograph, and they sit for a fraction of the night.

If a budget has to shrink, take it from the perimeter and the guest tables before you take it from the entry. A strong arrival piece and a bare corner reads as considered. A thin arrangement on every surface reads as underdone.

Venue turnaround and bump in windows

The single most common constraint on private event florals is not budget, it is time. A venue with a booking before yours will give you a window, and every element of the design has to fit inside it.

We confirm this with the venue before quoting, not after. It is a short conversation and it decides what is possible more than any design preference does.

Lead times by event type

Private events book on much shorter notice than weddings, and that is usually fine. What shortens is the design conversation, not the quality of the work.

• Two weeks or more. Comfortable for most private events using in season varieties. This is the majority of what we do.
• One to two weeks. Workable, with variety choice narrowed to what is reliably at market that week.
• Under one week. Possible for delivery only work at modest scale. Installations at this notice depend entirely on crew availability.
• Under 48 hours. We will tell you honestly whether we can do it. For funerals we usually can.

When an event needs more notice than you would think

Three situations need eight weeks or more regardless of scale: any hanging installation that requires rigging sign off from the venue, any event on a public holiday weekend, and any event during the last two weeks of November or the first two of December, when corporate function season takes every available crew in the country.

Party flowers

For parties, the two places that repay spending are the entry and wherever people stand rather than sit. Guests spend more time at the bar than at their table, and almost nobody photographs the corner of the room you decorated because it looked empty.

Common questions about event flowers