The invitation
When Juliette Blanc hosts a luncheon at her 18th-century farmhouse outside Gordes, the invitations arrive on heavy cotton paper with a single pressed lavender stem tucked inside. The dress code: linen. The time: 12:30 precisely, when the light through the plane trees is at its most dappled and the cicadas have not yet reached their full afternoon volume.
Blanc, a floral designer whose clients include Château La Coste and the Hôtel Crillon, approaches entertaining the way she approaches an installation: as a total composition. ‘A table is a landscape,’ she says. ‘You don’t just put flowers on it. You build a world.’
The table
The table was set under the plane trees on the eastern terrace, where the morning sun lingers until two o’clock. Blanc used six vintage French linen tablecloths, each slightly different in tone — cream, ecru, oatmeal, ivory, chalk, stone — layered to create depth rather than uniformity. ‘One cloth is a tablecloth. Six cloths is a story about time and wear and the beauty of things that have been used.’
The flowers were not arrangements in the traditional sense. Blanc scattered individual stems — garden roses, scabiosa, poppy pods, olive branches — directly on the cloth between the plates, as if they had fallen from the trees. ‘I wanted it to feel like the garden had joined us at the table, not like I had decorated a table with the garden.’
The menu
Three courses, each paired with a flower: a chilled courgette soup with a single nasturtium floating on the surface; slow-roasted lamb with lavender and rosemary from the garden; a peach and verbena tart with crystallised rose petals. The wines were local — a Bandol rosé and a white from Cassis — served in mismatched antique glasses collected from brocantes across the Luberon.
‘The best entertaining,’ Blanc says, ‘is generous but not ostentatious. You want people to feel that this was made for them, specifically, not that you are performing for them.’
