Telling a brand’s story through floristry: the Maker’s Mark launch dinner
I don’t work with dried flowers very often. My instinct tends toward fresh, seasonal flowers. So when Shalina of All In The Detail Events called me about this brief, and it became clear that dried was the only material that would tell this story properly, it was the kind of creative challenge I found genuinely exciting.
The brief
The event was a pre-release celebration dinner for Star Hill Farm Whisky — Maker’s Mark’s first new mashbill in their seventy-year history, and their first ever wheat whisky. Named after the 1,100-acre Kentucky farm where the distillery has sat since 1953, Star Hill Farm Whisky is built around the grain that has always been Maker’s Mark’s defining ingredient: soft red winter wheat, the flavouring grain that sets their bourbon apart from every other distillery on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.
The brief was to bring the brand’s DNA into the room. Wheat was the thread. The rolling hills and farmland of Loretto, Kentucky were the landscape. The dinner was being held at Berry Bros. & Rudd on St James’s Street — one of the oldest wine and spirits merchants in the world, trading from its Grade II* listed Georgian building since 1698. The whole event was about heritage, craft and provenance. The flowers needed to honour all of that.
The design
I decided early on that fresh flowers would have been wrong here. This wasn’t a spring lunch or a summer wedding. It was an intimate dinner built around a spirit with seventy years of history, being celebrated inside a building with three hundred. Dried materials — with their warmth, their texture, their quieter palette — were the natural answer.
The centrepiece of the table design was the wheat baskets. I made these by hand — intricate woven structures to hold the arrangements, which ran the full length of the table alongside tall taper candles. The dried flowers throughout were chosen for their meadow quality: textures and forms that evoked open farmland, golden-hour fields, something harvested and preserved. Working with dried flowers requires a different kind of attention than fresh work — the proportions and weight sit differently, and you’re building something that won’t soften or shift over the course of an evening, so the structure has to be right from the start.
At one end of the table we built a mountain installation — a sculptural piece designed to reference the Kentucky landscape where the distillery sits, and to hold the Star Hill Farm Whisky bottles as the focal point of the evening. I framed this with taller dried meadow grasses so it rose out of the arrangement naturally rather than sitting apart from it. The effect, I’m told, was like a piece of landscape brought indoors.
Shalina and her team are exactly the kind of planners who make this work possible. When every detail of an event is considered at the level they work at — the brief, the timeline, the client relationship — the flowers have the best possible conditions to do what they’re supposed to do. This event was a success because the storytelling was consistent from start to finish: the venue, the food, the styling, the flowers. Nothing was incidental.
The events I find most satisfying are the ones where the flowers aren’t decorative in the conventional sense — where they’re not just there to look pretty, but to mean something. The Maker’s Mark dinner was one of those. Every material I chose traced directly back to the brand’s story: the wheat, the dried grasses, the mountain form, the warm earthy palette. When the client says the arrangements brought the inspiration behind their brand to life, that’s the brief answered exactly as it should be.
Photography: Nikhil Jadeja
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