In the Studio with Camille Moreau: The Parisian Florist Who Treats Flowers Like Haute Couture

The atelier on Rue du Bac

Camille Moreau’s studio occupies the ground floor of an 18th-century building in the 7th arrondissement, a stone’s throw from Le Bon Marché. The space is less a flower shop than a fashion atelier — bolts of silk ribbon hang from brass rails, vintage dress forms wear unfinished arrangements, and the scent of garden roses mingles with something more structural: beeswax, old stone, the faint mustiness of antique paper.

Moreau, 34, spent her first career in the fabric ateliers of Chanel before walking away at 29 to study under the legendary Parisian florist Christian Tortu. ‘At Chanel, I learned that a garment is architecture for the body,’ she says, settling into a worn velvet armchair. ‘A flower arrangement is architecture for a room. The same principles apply — proportion, line, negative space, the way one element leads the eye to the next.’

Her method: the fashion house approach

Moreau works in seasons, like a fashion house. There are four collections a year — spring, summer, autumn, winter — each with a defined palette, a signature flower, and a ‘silhouette’ that governs the shape of every arrangement. Her spring collection centred on a single peony variety (‘Coral Charm’, sourced from a grower in the Loire Valley) arranged in tall, attenuated vessels that drew the eye upward. Autumn was all about rust-coloured dahlias in low, wide bowls that spread across a table like fabric.

‘I design each season the way a creative director designs a collection,’ she explains. ‘There is a story, a mood, a cast of characters. The peony is the star; the eucalyptus and the trailing ivy are the supporting cast. Every stem has a role.’

The artisan network

Moreau sources vessels from a network of ceramicists, glassblowers, and metalsmiths — all French, all independent. Her current favourites include the Normandy potter Élodie Martin, whose matte-glazed stoneware vessels in chalky whites and deep charcoals appear throughout her work, and the Lyon-based verrier Julien Blanc, whose handblown glass cylinders are thin as eggshells.

‘The vessel is not a container,’ she says. ‘It is half the composition. When a client commissions an arrangement, I ask about the room it will live in — the light, the colours, the furniture. The flowers must belong there, as if they grew from the floorboards.’