Fake flower decor a splashy trend in big-city restaurants
NEW YORK — Marigolds don’t generally thrive in 30-degree weather. Yet on a cool March afternoon, they bloomed in golden bunches outside Bungalow, a new Indian restaurant in the East Village. The petals appeared perky and thriving, as did the man, Carlos Franqui, expertly twisting them into a colorful archway that crawled around the entrance.
How had Franqui so deftly defied nature? The question seemed to vex the many passersby who stopped to gape. Then one woman bent down to take a sniff and discovered the flowers’ secret: They were fake. So were most of the plants and elaborate flower arrangements throughout the restaurant. The camellia leaves framing the entrance? Polyester. The ficus in the vestibule? Plastic. The bright-pink roses on the tables? Real — and wilting.
Franqui, sporting thickrimmed glasses and slickedback hair, pointed an accusing, gold-painted fingernail at the roses. “Mine don’t droop,” he said.
Sprawling, towering, flamboyant installations of faux flowers and leaves are fast becoming a new hallmark of restaurant design, the florid successor to past fixations such as open kitchens, Mason jars and those cordless tabletop lamps. In the last few years they’ve sprung up across the United States and in cities such as London, Paris, Toronto and Lagos, Nigeria. They form soaring arches, climb up dining room walls and send their tendrils deep into social media, where they brighten many a weekend-brunch post.
What began as a pandemic-era solution for dressing up outdoor dining sheds has now outlasted plexiglass dividers and QR codes to become its own maximalist design movement, with Franqui as a chief trendsetter.
“He is very much at the forefront,” said Alsún Keogh, a New York City designer who hired Franqui’s company, Floratorium, in 2020 to cover the scaffolding outside the luxe Manhattan
seafood restaurant Marea in blue-and-white cascades of fake hydrangeas. “If you have the installation done by Floratorium, that has a certain cachet.”
Bold florals may seem a major departure from the minimalism and neutral hues that pervade big-city restaurants. But a similar shift occurred after the Great Recession, said Thomas Schoos, the founder of Schoos Design in Los Angeles.
In the wake of hard times, “people want to live,” he said. “They want to be loud.”
Franqui, 45, is not the only purveyor of these artificial landscapes, but he’s probably the most prolific. Floratorium has installed its work in more than 300 restaurants across the United States and Canada, charging about $40,000 to $50,000 per project. (The typical monthly floral budget for a fine-dining restaurant is about $5,000, Keogh said.)
Demand is so high that Franqui recently opened a Miami office to supplement his warehouse in Wood-ridge, New Jersey. He has even trademarked his styling process under the name Biofauxlia. A factory in China recently called him just to ask who he was, since he was buying so many of its fake flowers.
Franqui has won over restaurateurs who once swore by real plants with his overgrown archways of manufactured flora that look startlingly real: orchids with velvety petals, Queen Anne’s lace with frail frills.
“I’m not designing as ‘I’m designing an arrangement,’” said Franqui, whose lush style is inspired by the rainforest surroundings of his Puerto Rican hometown, Fajardo. “I’m designing as Mother Nature would design.”
Schoos, who has worked with Franqui, went a little further: “I can’t help but see this as the creation of a new art.”
Like any new art movement, this one is polarizing.
Paloma Picasso, an accounting-firm administrator who was dining at Baby Brasa in Greenwich Village, said it was the flowers, more than the food, that
drew her in. “You just go in, and with the intrigue of the flowers and seeing that it is a nice place to take a picture, you’re like, ‘Let’s try it out.’”
But the displays also turned up last year on New York magazine’s list of tipoffs that a restaurant is bad. The writer, Tammie Teclemariam, bemoaned floral entryways and fakeivy walls as “the ultimate in millennial-coded Instagram design.”
Fake florals signal that a restaurant doesn’t care about upkeep, said Kristian Brown, a clothing salesperson who was dining at Recette, a French restaurant in Brooklyn. Plastic plants can’t photosynthesize, she added. “We need the oxygen.”
Love them or hate them,
faux flora have come a long way from the stiff specimens in funeral homes and craft stores. Sales of artificial plants and dried flowers reached $2.3 billion last year in the U.S., a 52% increase from 2020, according to data analytics company Circana.
While most florists chase weddings and bridal showers,
Franqui, who used to work in advertising, said he always saw flowers as more of a marketing tool.
When he sold clothes for the boutique retailer Intermix in the early 2000s, he staged photo shoots at theaters and monasteries. “Nobody is buying a $4,000 dress on a white plastic mannequin,” he said. “You need to sell the lifestyle.”
He started Floratorium in 2014, realizing that in the Instagram age, he could help businesses by creating pretty floral backdrops for customers to pose in front of. Their social media posts would be free advertising.
But to be cost-effective, the flowers had to last. The only solution was to go faux.
Franqui’s designs have a distinct look. They start with braided branches of real curly willow and wisteria — both harvested in upstate New York. Onto the branches Franqui layers foliage and flowers, bending, twirling and fluffing them so they look more natural.
The plant species should align with the restaurant’s cuisine, he said — no tropical flowers, say, in a redsauce Italian joint. “I saw a lemon tree with a variegated ficus,” Franqui said. “I almost died.”