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.
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, 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.
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 fake-ivy 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 United States, a 52% increase from 2020, according to the 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.— NYT
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