THOUGH HUMANS HAVE been lighting fires inside dwellings (before houses, caves) for many millenniums, the fireplace mantel likely didn’t appear until the 12th century, as a hood to catch smoke. By the late 18th century, the mantel was also a design feature; wealthy Americans of that era added robust pilasters of Coade stone and decorative carvings of shells and laurels. It had also become a place to display paintings, candlesticks and heirlooms, as well as the most ethereal decorations: flowers.
According to Joshua Werber, 39, the Brooklyn-based floral artist and milliner, mantel arrangements have never gone out of style. “Mantels will always anchor a room,” he says — and a new wave of floral designers are making them a particular focus, shifting the attention away from long-dominant tablescapes with sculptural arrangements tailor-made to the mantelpiece’s elevated height, picture frame-like angularity and architectural scale. With trailing tendrils and dramatic colorways, these statement-making creations are emerging as the season’s most over-the-top floral trend, especially in the fashion world.
The Sydney, Australia-based artist Lisa Cooper, 47, who has worked with Hermès and Dries Van Noten, sees the mantel as the ultimate stage for unusual stems and operatic blooms. Cooper, who has been making arrangements since her early 20s, discovered the “metaphorical grace” of flowers at 13, when her father died, leading her to choose them as her medium. In the years since, she’s amassed a following with her often goth spindles of ancient banksia and brooding hellebores inspired by the work of Francis Bacon. Her own simple, all-white mantel is frequently featured in her Instagram posts: “I’m drawn to the formality of its structure so that I can disrupt it with an undulance of flowers,” says Cooper, who has a portrait of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (the patron of florists) hanging above her hearth. “Flowers, patterns and shades become so much more apparent against the innate framework of the mantelpiece,” she says.
Whether assembling shaggy Seussian wigs of spider chrysanthemum or jumbles of flowering Corymbia ficifolia, Cooper plays off her clients’ tile surrounds and chimney brickwork, as well as any objets, mirrors or art in her line of sight. “When I’m making something for a mantel, it demands to be forward facing, and because of the height, it’s ideal for long vines or plunging grasses,” she says. Often, her work is about leaning into unlikely juxtapositions. “For a heavily ornate fireplace, I’d do something ruthless and completely discordant, like crimson trails of love-lies-bleeding that become all texture,” she says. On a more minimalist fireplace, Cooper might choose a billowing assortment of tulip varieties, which she likes because they continue to grow after they’re cut, “as if they’re hyper-alive.” She takes particular delight in finding flowers that even her worldliest clients have never heard of, like Sturt’s desert pea, a scarlet, slender-tipped creeping flower with a bulbous black center that she featured in a recent arrangement for Hermès.
IT WAS COOPER’S fantastical approach that inspired Louis-Géraud Castor, who studied archaeology and art history at the Sorbonne and worked as an art dealer for 15 years, to transition into floristry. In 2017, he opened Castor Fleuriste in a courtyard in Paris’s Marais district. With an eye for purist design, he creates monochromatic swirls of hortensias, yarrow and amaranth that are reminiscent of topiaries; bowls of waterlilies; and snowy mountains of muscari in primitive raw wooden vessels — all of them tailored to the scale and drama of the mantel. “I take cues from Mother Nature and connect them to artists I admire,” says Castor, who counts the Modernist designer Eileen Gray and Jean-Michel Frank as particular influences. (He often uses vases custom-made by the Parisian ceramist Mathilde Martin to elevate his arrangements.) “I always tell my clients to just give me a color and let me take it from there,” he says, citing a mantel arrangement he did for the designer Nicolas Ghesquière’s Paris apartment as an example. Ghesquière asked for blue and orange, Castor says, so he picked spindly alpine sea holly, tawny day lilies and ultramarine sweet peas to create a spiky, oversize bouquet. “A good florist is a good colorist,” he says.
Taking a more restrained approach is the Sydney-born Simone Gooch, who makes mantel arrangements at her London studio, Fjura, that almost resemble Japanese ikebana. “I consider each flower as I’m placing it, and it’s not always the case that more is more,” says Gooch, who has collaborated with Chanel, Hermès, Loewe and Lanvin. But nothing delights her more than working in private homes, as she likes riffing on existing design elements. “The width of the mantelpiece determines just how abundant you can go,” says Gooch, who might use descending columbines or boughs of flowering quince for a larger hearth versus violets, lilies of the valley and pansies for a shallow ledge. She gets inspiration at times by looking through the vases, containers and pottery that her clients have collected. “Everything displayed on a mantel is usually deliberate and deeply intimate,” she says. “It connects me not just to the history of someone’s home but also to their personal past.”
Werber, too, enjoys mixing ephemeral blooms with timeless pieces. His recent composition of vanda orchids, golden pothos, star-shaped cryptanthus, colchicum bulbs and glimmering castor leaves was set off by the artist Alison Layton’s brass philodendron vines. “Small arrangements may be fine for the tablescape,” he says, “but when it comes to the mantel, there’s really nothing like a grand gesture.”
Metal artist: Alison Layton. Photo assistant: Liam Sheehan. Set assistant: Kervens Mazile. Floral assistant: Kinga Mojsa
The post Florists Take Up the Mantelpiece appeared first on New York Times.
