Winter Holiday Party at Celsius, Bryant Park
In Bloom kicked off the holiday season with a string of events at one of our favorite venues for winter holiday parties, Celsius at Bryant Park. We dressed up this ‘glass house’-style restaurant, bar and event space – an ideal winter wonderland – for a festive and memorable client appreciation party on December 2, a date which coincided with the tree lighting at the Pond at Bryant Park.
In order to transform the pop-up venue for our client, we remodeled the environment by using floral and winter branch arrangements, renting furniture, custom ordering monogrammed pillows, arranging for gobo lighting, as well as staging an ice sculpture showcasing the exact company logo.
Plant partitions, which normally demarcate the open upstairs area with views of the big tree and skating rink, became attractive dividers between the lounge and cocktail areas. We draped the partitions in custom-cut white linens with mirrored surfaces on top of which we placed white manzanita branch structures with hanging mercury glass votive candles.
In addition to the larger installations and standing birch branch arrangements, the table arrangements incorporated more branches than straight florals, contributing to the “winter woodsy” effect imagined by the client. The design included white birch branches and white-dipped thistles in glass cylinders with realistic wet “snow.” The smaller arrangements for the seven cocktail tables evoked snowflake clusters of the same white thistles in metallic towers.
For the bar, we delivered an orchid trio: the largest arrangement being white birch branches with white cymbidiums in a birch-wrapped container, the next a submerged phalaenopsis with pale river rocks, and finally a bunch of spraying dendrobium orchids.
We were just as pleased as the client with the overall transformation and thank everyone for the rave reviews!
-Parker Voss
Yoshitomo Nara’s Retrospective Opening at the Asia Society
Earlier this fall, In Bloom enjoyed the honor of collaborating with the Asia Society to dress their Park Avenue building for a very special event. For the first time, the Asia Society has devoted their entire exhibition space to a major retrospective entitled Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody's Fool, featuring the Neo-pop work of the Japanese artist. We wanted our floral and environmental designs to celebrate the curious and beautiful quality of Nara's paintings & sculpture. Our proposal for and execution of the design for the Young Patron's Cocktail Party and Patron's Dinner were rooted in the unsuspecting character of the artist's oeuvre.
Yoshitomo Nara, "Too Young to Die," 2001
Based on the exhibition's thematic overtones of slyness, rebellion and punk music, we created a delicate take on toilet paper vandalism by draping the Garden Court trees with crepe streamers.
Our initial illustrations of the effect helped to visualize the final result.
Inspired by traditional taihu rockery, our smaller arrangments for the cocktail tables consisted of driftwood with stricta airplants and coral cocscomb.
In placing the heads of multi-colored dried and fresh flowers on a wooden dough bowl, we aimed to evoke the painter's palette using tones of periwinkle, greens, oranges and yellows.
To compliment the representational, abstract nature of Nara's work, we embedded manzanita branches in Spanish moss with purple thistles, green hydrangea and teddy bear sunflowers for the bar arrangements.
The centerpieces for the Patron's Dinner combined elements from the previous displays to form a cohesive design scheme. We studded manzanita branches mainly with Yoko Ono poms to create an original take on the traditional flower centerpiece.
Check out Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody's Fool at the Asia Society going on until January 2, 2011.
Yoshitomo Nara, "The Little Star Dweller," 2006
-Parker Voss
