A collection built on line and restraint needed a room to prove itself in. So we took the Theatre Royale at Restaurant Hubert for a Friday long lunch, co-hosted with Holly Boorman, and showed High Floral Design to the people who notice when something is finished.
High Floral Design did not launch on a product page. It launched underground, at half past twelve on a Friday, beneath the red curtain of the Theatre Royale at Restaurant Hubert in Sydney. Two long white tables ran towards the stage. Tapers were lit while it was still bright outside. And on the timber sideboard, between candles and framed portraits, the three debut designs sat in a row like a lineup before a show: Soleil in yellow and white, Carmen in blush and apricot, Sienna in rust and terracotta.
That order of events was the point. A collection that asks flowers to behave like couture, with fewer stems and more intention, cannot be judged from a photograph on a white background. It has to be seen at conversation height, beside a glass of wine and a plate of something French, in a room full of people who dress properly and look at silhouette before they count stems. So we built the room first.
Flowers, back in the language of fashion
High Floral Design comes from co-founder Kellie Brown's years in fashion, and it treats floristry as a design discipline rather than a delivery service. Line, proportion, colour and silhouette are handled the way a designer handles a garment. Every element has a job. Anything that is only filling comes out.
"I never wanted to be a florist who just puts flowers in a vase and sends them out the door," Kellie says. "High Floral Design is really me bringing my fashion years into the studio. You think about a bouquet the way you'd think about getting dressed properly: the line of it, the proportions, how the colours sit together, the shape it makes in a room. Every stem has to be doing something. If it isn't, it comes out."
Which is why the launch looked less like a flower launch and more like a fashion lunch. Hubert's theatre already knows how to stage an afternoon: red velvet, dark timber panelling, a stage at the end of the room. We used that grammar rather than fighting it. Holly Boorman co-hosted and shaped the afternoon with us, guests were asked to dress up, and the flowers were placed where a stylist would put them rather than where a florist would.
The three designs
Each of the debut pieces is made to order and built around a single, protected palette.
Soleil works in yellow and white: pale phalaenopsis and calla lily, cream and lemon set beneath them, and a fall of hanging amaranthus that carries the line down past the vessel. On the sideboard it was the clearest silhouette in the room.
Carmen runs from blush into apricot: hydrangea and phalaenopsis held in one continuous temperature, trailed with rose-pink amaranthus that spills over the edge of whatever it stands on. Between two candles at Hubert it read like a gown from across the room.
Sienna is the warm one, in rust and terracotta: cymbidium orchid held high, coral ranunculus and deep red orchid beneath, autumn foliage carrying the colour out wide and low. It is the piece that belongs to timber and candlelight.
All three are priced from $449, made to order in our own studios, and delivered across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. They are studies in form and restraint rather than shelf stock, so we ask about the room and the occasion before we begin. Orchids run through all three designs, and they are the longest-lived flowers in the collection. If you want the piece to keep its shape for weeks, our note on phalaenopsis orchid care is worth five minutes.
The room
The guest list was small on purpose. Stylists Monica Morales and Fleur Egan were there, along with creators Alex Talfino and Ciara Keva, and a room of people who understand proportion for a living. Kellie spoke briefly between courses about where the collection came from and why the studio edits so hard. The best photographs from the afternoon are of people talking.
Down the length of both tables the dressing stayed low so that guests could see each other: pink calla lilies in slender black vases, tapers in black holders, radicchio, grapes and halved pomegranates set straight onto the cloth, and a small posy wrapped in white paper at every place, beside a menu that ran from duck parfait to kingfish. On a side table against the red theatre seats, two calla lilies and a candle did the work of a whole arrangement. That is the collection's idea at its smallest scale. Nothing that is not doing something.
We built the room first, and asked the flowers to hold their own in it.
What the afternoon showed
A design either holds its shape when people are in the frame or it disappears into decoration. Watching Carmen between two candles with a table of guests leaning past it, or Sienna against the dark panelling as the light dropped, was the first real reading of the work. They held. Colour that survived candlelight without shouting. Height against the curtain. A low line across the cloth that kept the conversation open.
That is what we mean when we say flowers can be a statement of taste rather than a gesture. Not bigger. Not louder. An object that belongs in the architecture it enters, and that says something accurate about the person who sent it.
High Floral Design is available now at figandbloom.com, delivered across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Kellie has written about the thinking behind it in two companion pieces, The Palette We Protect and Line and Scale in the Room. The lunch was the proof in situ.
Three palettes, made to order.
Soleil, Carmen and Sienna, from $449. Explore High Floral Design →
The candles at Hubert have long since burnt down. The collection is still in the room.
