The Sister by Studio Ashby showroom is always full of flowers. Fresh ones still have their place there, but they’re beautiful for a week and then gone. So when the team asked whether paper could sit alongside them, I didn’t need asking twice.
Earlier in the year it was blue poppies. For their latest changeover it was burgundy cosmos and sunflowers, two flowers that couldn't be more different if they tried.
One flower to a vase
The team at Sister treat paper flowers exactly as they would fresh ones: one kind of flower per vase, never a mixed bunch. I love that rule. Every stem has to hold its own, and there's nowhere to tuck a wonky one.
The colours came from their moodboard for the room: purples and burgundies on one side, pinks and oranges on the other. Burgundy cosmos for one, sunflowers for the other. And they had to hold their own in a room full of big, bold paintings. That’s a lot of colour to keep up with.
The scruffy one and the show-off
I started with a few pictures I'd saved. A jug of marigolds and cosmos going off in every direction, from Sean Anthony Pritchard. Sunflowers that fade from yellow into burgundy, from a post by Izzy Saklawska that I'd saved back in the summer. Neither was quite what I was making, but both had the feeling I wanted: flowers that look like they've just come in from the garden, not out of a florist's bucket.
Cosmos are all thin stems and petals that never quite sit straight. That looseness is the whole charm, and it's surprisingly hard to get right in paper, because paper wants to be neat. Burgundy makes them a bit moodier than the garden version, which felt right for that side of the room.
Sunflowers are the opposite. Big faces, heavy heads, the flower everyone recognises from across a room. I made mine yellow with burgundy running into the petals, so they'd sit happily with the cosmos rather than fight them. In a showroom full of furniture and fabric, they needed to be seen from the doorway without shouting over everything else.
And the best bit: nobody at Sister has to top up the water, and nothing will be drooping by Friday.
Behind the scenes
Each sunflower petal is four layers of fine crepe paper, and I painted every single one by hand. There are about 25 petals to a flower, so fifteen sunflowers comes to roughly 375 of them, all laid face up on a board by the window to dry. Rows and rows, like a tiny army waiting for orders.
The dye gets mixed on an old plate, which by the end of the day looks like the scene of a very small crime. Worth it for that colour, though.
The centres are the bit people always ask about. Dark brown fringed paper, rolled tight, and they look a lot like hedgehogs until the petals go on.
The cosmos were a different job. Fewer petals, but those feathery leaves take ages, and every flower has to tilt its own way. Otherwise the whole bunch looks like it's standing to attention.
In the end there were fifteen sunflowers and seven cosmos, with extra foliage tucked in so the cosmos looked properly bushy.
Got a room that needs flowers?
If you have a showroom, a shop or a hotel lobby that could do with flowers that last longer than a week, I'd love to hear about it. Write to me at hello@emmelikimhi.com and tell me a little about the space.
Or if you'd just like a few stems for your own kitchen table, have a look in the shop.
Photographs of the showroom by Dean Hearne.