Artificial Plants
The Next Best Thing
We love live plants, and use them wherever we can. They are the genuine article, and there is nothing quite like seeing a plant grow and thrive over time.However, sometimes the most practical option is an artificial plant, sometimes still called a silk plant. For example, if the light conditions aren’t quite right, or if the plants are up high or simply can’t be accessed for regular watering. In these circumstances, our expert team can help provide you with the advice you need. We will work with you to create the perfect design—ones that will incorporate real plants where we can, and artificial ones where we can’t.
Artificials are a case of getting what you pay for. The cheap end of the market looks it, and no amount of styling hides a bad leaf. The grades we specify are convincing enough that most people never look twice, and beyond an occasional dust they ask nothing of you.
We will also ensure a professional installation, so that your plantscape will still look great and only someone with a very keen eye will ever be able to tell the difference.
Styling Is the Service
Anyone can buy an artificial plant. The difference between a display that reads as real and one that announces itself from across the room is in what you buy and how it is set. That is the part we do.
What we buy
We buy to a standard, not to a price.
A good artificial has varied leaf colour, visible veining, and stems that bend where a real one would. The cheap end is moulded in one flat green, and it looks it from three metres away.
We will not install the second kind. The room is what people remember, and a bad artificial is the first thing they notice in it.
How we set it
Specified and styled by our design team.
Our Head of Design specifies and sets the artificial work. Garlands are cut to length and wired in by hand rather than draped. Species are mixed the way they would actually grow together.
Planters are finished with mulch and set so they read as planted rather than filled. It is slower than dropping a stem in a pot, and it is the whole difference.
Artificials also go where living plants simply cannot: above a bar, up a lift shaft, along a ceiling line nobody can reach with a watering can, or in a tenancy where the lease is too short to justify a living scheme.
Where We Have Used Them
A Brisbane tavern, planted end to end in artificials: trailing species wired through the rafters, long banquette joinery planted along its length, and staghorn ferns set into the walls. Almost no natural light, nothing above the bar that needs watering, and nothing a crowded Friday can knock over and kill.
Cut, wired and set on site over several stages.
Artificials also move fast when a fitout cannot wait. A recent optometry tenancy on Queen Street enquired on a Wednesday and opened on the Monday with its planters finished, because the stock was already on our warehouse shelves rather than on a boat.