The Modern Flower Press by Melissa Richardson

Author:Melissa Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

© Helen Cathcart

Sketch Facade

Project by Amy

In the early summer of 2018 we turned the entire facade of Sketch in Mayfair into a fantasy Rajasthani palace using dried and pressed flowers, which, considering it would have to survive the vagaries of the British weather, was our biggest challenge to date. Some of the most exciting, and often challenging, projects we’ve worked on have been commissioned by Sketch’s creative director, Sylvain Chevelu. Sketch is an eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse, transformed by Mourad Mazouz into a series of eclectic bars and restaurants, serving as a platform for different designers and ever-evolving art installations.

Our first installation for Sketch was a hanging canopy of 6,000 flowers in the Glade bar in May 2016. After a week spent preparing and wiring all the flowers, we had a team of florists install everything over one endless night, everyone frantically attaching individual stems and bunches of foliage to cover a 40-square-metre (430-square-feet) wire mesh suspended from the ceiling. When we came to dismantle the ceiling, all the flowers were completely moisture-free, and with hindsight this was probably our first successful experiment with dried flowers. Despite the sky-high levels of anxiety in the making of it, the installation was deemed a spectacular success.

A couple of years and a couple more extravagant installations later, Sylvain gave us and a handful of other leading florists a curious brief: to create an installation based on a place or country of our choice; loosely related to the upcoming Royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the places they might visit on their honeymoon. Melissa had recently returned from a month-long trip to Rajasthan with stories to tell and a phone full of images, so India seemed an obvious choice. Rather than basing our design on a specific place, our idea was to celebrate India and its relationship with flowers, including elements of a Rajah’s Palace or a Hindu Temple.

The entrance to Sketch is a long corridor with arched alcoves set into the walls on either side of an extravagant gold-painted ceiling. Our proposal was to turn this space into a series of decorated doorways. Huge sacks and baskets of brightly coloured dried flowers would line the hall; rope leis of marigolds and carnations would hang from a framework covered in sari silk.

We began leafing through images of the exquisite heritage doors of Rajasthan; looking at the centuries-old carpentry work of the Suthar community, the abandoned palaces of Shekhawati and the interior doors at Udaipur’s City Palace complex-a cluster of palaces built over 400 years ago, and a prime example of Mewari Rajput and Mughal architecture. In India, doorways are associated with cultural identity and new beginnings; they are framed by a series of elaborately carved and recessed arches, often painted and garlanded, while thresholds are embellished with traditional rangoli. A rangoli is a colourful design made on the floor near the entrance to a house or temple using coloured rice powder or flower petals to welcome guests. These temporary decorative motifs are often used during Hindu festivals and later inspired our pressed-flower mandala.

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