Scholten & Baijings

These images are taken from the in-store magazine of Hennes & Mauritz owned fashion brand COS. The Swedish chain store’s magazine looks at design,art and culture, and I thought that this series of floral images was particularly interesting. For their tenth issue, COS magazine asked five noted designers and artists to design them a custom-made bouquet. It’s interesting to see how each designer’s signature style transfers into floral design – apologies for the scanned images!The photography is by Marius W Hansen, and words are by Matthew Lowe:

Above – Amsterdam-based product design firm Scholten & Baijings. For their bouquet they made use of their signature mix of bright colours and linear grids. The beaming merino-wool-and-cotton blankets, from their Colour Plaids series, are shown here as background panels for a bouquet that includes a peony, red berries and gloriosa lilies. “Gloriosas are quite linear and occupy space very well. You only need one or two to create a composition,” say the designers. The arrangement rests on one of their award-winning Colour Grid tables. A number of these tables can also be found in the recently opened COS store in the centre of Amsterdam, a charming two-kilometre stroll from Scholten & Baijings’ studio.

Frank Bruggeman

This floral arrangement is by Rotterdam-based artist Frank Bruggeman. His imposing installations shown in museums and public spaces often consist of trees, flowers and other organic materials. For this exuberant bouquet, Bruggeman combined dry, wintery materials such as chestnut branches with newly flowering amaryllis and tulips. “It gives one a sense of the season,” says the artist. “Bouquets are living rather than static things, and thus temporary.” Instead of choosing a traditional vase, Bruggeman has made use of a kenzan or ‘spiky frog’, a flower holder from the ikebana practice. A true flora fanatic, Bruggeman is a founding editor of Club Donny, a journal on the personal experience of nature in the urban environment.

Åbäke. Åbäke

This bouquet is by London-based graphic design studio Åbäke. Åbäke’s collaborations and creative links span from printed matter and product design to teaching, fashion and music — they are for instance involved in the French cult label Kitsuné. One day, an intern at Åbäke went out foraging for cow parsley but accidentally picked the similar-looking yet highly poisonous hemlock instead. Several members of the studio ended up in hospital, but luckily no serious damage was done. That mistake inspired the use of hemlock for this arrangement. The composition also includes a photo of a poisonous fish and the head of Socrates, the philosopher and patron saint of all interns, who was poisoned with hemlock some 2411 years ago.

Faye Toogood

This floral arrangement is by British installation artist and designer Faye Toogood, whose mother was a florist. Toogood decided not to use the flowers and plants currently available in order to explore the idea of permanence, using metal structures covered with white wax instead. “I like bouquets just before you have to throw them out,” she says. The piece is like a fossilisation of a bouquet that has had its best day: the flowers have come to their end, the long stems left raw, like stalagmites growing in a cave. Also in the photograph above is Toogood’s spade chair, seen on the right, originally made in wood but recast here in aluminium and painted black. The vase holding the wax bouquet is actually a wine cooler painted white.

Maarten Baas

The bouquet above is the work of Dutch product designer Maarten Baas. em>He picked exaggerated blooms such as the gerbera, protea and anthurium and arranged them in a rather theatrical manner. The large stems sprout out of the silver vase like plants growing out of cracks in the pavement, but in an Alice in Wonderland-like fashion. To Baas the bouquet is all about the urban outdoors. “Urban environments are a mixture of people, which makes them wonderfully explosive,” he says. “The bouquet intends to emphasise that pluralism.” The table beneath the bouquet is from the designer’s renowned Clay series: synthetic clay is moulded over a metal skeleton to create the unique pieces.

- A.Morris