Why We Design Colour First, and Flowers Second

There are two ways to design an arrangement. You can start with the flowers: go to market, see what is beautiful, buy it, and compose around what you found. Or you can start with the colour, fix it before you leave the studio, and then find the best available material that serves it.

We do the second, and it is the single decision that most shapes how our work looks.

What goes wrong with flowers-first

Sourcing first feels creative and is mostly not. What actually happens is that the market makes the decision for you. A good dahlia crop that week means a dahlia arrangement. A thin week means filler. Over a season the work drifts, and the drift is invisible to the designer and completely visible to a client looking at your last twenty pieces.

It also makes consistency impossible. If a client loved what you delivered in April and wants something in that spirit in October, flowers-first has no way to answer that. Colour-first does.

How a palette actually gets built

Each season we set three. This autumn they came from the Pantone Fashion Color Trend Report for Autumn/Winter 2026, which sounds more corporate than it is; it is simply a well-researched read on where colour is going, and it keeps our seasonal work in conversation with what our clients are already seeing in fashion and interiors.

Every palette gets five roles, and each colour is assigned one:

• Anchor: the deepest value. Gives the arrangement its weight and usually sits low and centre.
• Primary: the colour you will remember afterwards. The most stems.
• Bridge: the shade that makes the anchor and the primary look related rather than adjacent.
• Breath: the light value. Cream, ivory, pale tan. Without it a palette reads heavy and the eye has nowhere to rest.
• Accent: five to ten percent, no more. The note that stops the whole thing being tasteful and forgettable.

That last one does the most work for the least volume. In this season's Burnt Ember palette the accent is a single chartreuse bloom. Remove it and the arrangement reads as harvest decor. Include it and it reads as design.

What it means for what arrives at your door

No two arrangements we make are identical, because we compose to whatever is genuinely at its best that week. If the butterfly ranunculus are extraordinary on Tuesday, you get more of them. If they are tired, we use something else in the same value.

The palette is the promise. The specific stems are a judgement we make on the day.

So the guarantee is not these exact flowers. It is that the piece will be unmistakably its palette, and that it will be built from the best material available rather than the material we committed to a week earlier.

Restraint is part of it

A defined palette also gives you permission to leave things out. When every colour has a job, a stem that does not serve one is easy to reject. Most arrangements we make are improved in the last five minutes by removing something, not adding it.

We would rather deliver something quieter and more certain than something fuller and less sure.