Apryl and I just completed designs for a fabulous bride for her late November wedding. She has a unique sense of style and really got us started on our previous post about vintage wedding bouquets!
For this post, we thought it would be fun to show the mood board and the resulting designs.
Mood Board for the Art Nouveau November Wedding
About the Color Palette & Style:
The main colors are a bronze-y gold, deep greens, ivories, and burgundy. Our design approach, inspired by Art Nouveau, is elegant and stylized, but grounded in patterns found in the natural world.*
Bride’s Bouquet:
Our bride asked for a more unique, slightly cascade/vintage style bouquet. We used antique wedding photos for inspiration:
And here is Petalena’s “Vintage Modern” creation:
Vintage Modern Style Bouquet by Petalena
Some of the flowers we used are classic, lovely wedding flowers like gardenias and calla lilies. Just timeless. To layer in touches of bronze in the bride’s bouquet we also added gorgeous hand-wired cymbidium orchids and brown amaranthus.
Detail of Gardenias and Orchids
We love using gardenias – they are a bit sensitive but their beauty and scent make it worth it. Usually they will last only a few hours outside of a lovely cooler before beginning to wilt and brown slightly. Still, if it is a favorite flower of a bride, I just think they are totally worth doing.
The bridesmaids’ bouquets (seven in total!) incorporated burgundy along with golds and ivories. We did each one differently but within the same palette range. It was a lot of fun to work this way, more free-form, less formal and each bouquet turned out beautifully individual.
Amaryllis and Fiddleheads
Amaryllis Bouquet with Fiddleheads
Here we used fully opened, lush burgundy Amaryllis with a few of the bronze cymbidiums, and dark brown fiddleheads. Fiddleheads are quite popular right now, they add such a sculptural touch to designs. Also note the trailing ribbons with the bridesmaid’s name embroidered on one of the ribbons. A great personal touch.
Bouquet Detail (because I LOVE details)
Hydrangea and Callas:
Bouquet with hydrangeas and calla lilies
This bouquet featured one huge ruffle-y burgundy-meets-green hydrangea, complemented by calla lilies, ferns, and interesting textural foliage. It’s fun and dramatic.
Another variation with some of these same flowers is below in the Maid-of-Honor’s bouquet:
Maid-of-Honor's Bouquet
Cymbidium Orchids with Astilbe:
I am a little obsessed these days with the combination of cymbidium orchids with astilbe. Probably because both flowers come in several colors, the possibilities for color combinations seems so varied. The delicate feathery nature of the astilble contrasts in a lovely way with the unique structure of the cymbidium orchid.
Cymbidium and Astilble Bouquet
You can see our other post “Pretty in Pink” for another example of this flower combination with a very different, more delicate color palette.
Reception Arrangements:
The wedding reception was close to 200 people so our bride wanted to try and keep the design more minimal for the reception arrangements so the ceremony flowers could be extra luxurious. She had a vision of lots of glowing hurricane lanterns with tall candles on each table. To complete the look we created hand-wired magnolia leaf wreaths for each table:
Centerpieces with Magnolia Wreaths
Magnolia leaves are simply beautiful – waxy dark green on one side and velvety brown on the other. It’s great to alternate them, side up, side down since they have such a natural contrast.
Another view of table arrangements
I think this turned out beautifully. It really shows that you don’t always have to do something elaborate or complicated for it to be elegant. Sometimes simple says more.
**For more about Art Nouveau see the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.’s website and an exhibition they created a few years ago here. Or the ever present Wikipedia too has some interesting information too.
February 21, 2009 at 4:57 pm
I love this collection of art nouveau style concepts especially the flowers, & invites. I am desperate to find great sites like yours for my upcoming wedding in Jan 2010. It seems very hard to find any true art nouveau wedding pages. I’m in South Florida & I see you’re in Boston. Do you have a sister company down here by any chance?
February 23, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Hi Nicole! Thanks for posting a comment – unfortunately we don’t have a sister company in Florida, but we would really recommend saving all the photos of flowers and invites you like – show that to the florist you want work with. A good designer would be able to translate the style you want for your day into reality!
I agree it is hard to find art nouveau wedding sites, mainly because they just don’t exist…a bummer, but you can find lots of great ideas by looking at other sites!
~Apryl & Julie
July 20, 2009 at 5:00 am
[...] af Octavine Illustration via Flickr, Dørhåndtag fra Hotel Le Savoy, Ring fra Pilgrim, Buket fra Petalena, Klimt inspireret kage fra Pink Cake Box, Plakat fra Alfons Mucha via Juana La [...]