Camille Moreau works in a former button factory in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, a light-filled atelier on the top floor where the windows run the entire length of one wall and the floor is permanently scattered with petals. She is thirty-four, has the kind of effortless French elegance that makes you want to throw away everything in your wardrobe and start again, and she is, by broad consensus, the most sought-after floral designer in Paris — which is to say, probably the most sought-after in the world. Her clients include three maisons de couture, two palaces on the Place Vendôme, and a roster of private clients whose names she will not disclose but whose flowers, she allows, ‘are never the same twice.’
I visited her on a Tuesday morning in late spring, when the peonies were at their peak and the atelier smelled, improbably, of both roses and freshly baked bread — a junior designer, I later discovered, was toasting brioche in the tiny kitchenette behind the cutting tables. Moreau was working on an installation for a fashion show the following week. The brief, from a house she cannot name, was simple: ‘Make the room disappear.’ She was interpreting this, she explained, by building a wall of delphiniums eight metres long and three metres high, through which the models would emerge one by one. ‘The flowers are not decoration,’ she said, cutting a stem of blue delphinium with the kind of scissors that surgeons use. ‘They are architecture. They are the room.’
The atelier method
Moreau trained at the École des Fleuristes de Paris, the city’s oldest floristry school, but she credits her real education to three years working for an elderly florist in the Marché aux Fleurs on the Île de la Cité — the historic flower market that has operated on the same site since 1808. ‘He taught me that a flower is not a product,’ she said. ‘It is a living thing. It has a personality. It has a bad side and a good side. It wants to face the light. If you do not respect that, the arrangement will fight you.’
This philosophy — that flowers are collaborators, not materials — informs everything in Moreau’s practice. She does not use floral foam, the green spongy blocks that most florists rely on to hold stems in place, because it is non-biodegradable and because, she says, ‘it makes the flowers lazy. They do not have to try.’ Instead, she builds armatures from chicken wire and moss, structures that the flowers can be threaded through and that hold them without constraining them. The effect is arrangements that look less ‘arranged’ than grown — as if the flowers had simply chosen to gather in this particular corner of the room.
Haute couture, in petals
The comparison to haute couture is inevitable — she works for fashion houses, she treats each commission as a unique creation rather than a variation on a template, and her work is priced accordingly — but it is also genuinely illuminating. Like a couturier, Moreau begins each project with materials, not a design. ‘I go to the market and I see what is beautiful that day,’ she said. ‘The design comes from the flowers. Not the other way around.’ This is the opposite of how most event floristry works, where the design is decided months in advance and the flowers are ordered to specification, regardless of what is actually at its peak on the day. It is riskier, more expensive, and vastly more beautiful.
For a recent wedding at a château in the Loire Valley, Moreau arrived at Rungis, the vast wholesale market outside Paris, at four in the morning and spent two hours walking the aisles before she bought a single stem. The result, assembled on site over the next twelve hours, was an arch of garden roses, clematis, and jasmine that looked like it had grown there over a century. The bride, Moreau told me, cried. ‘Not because it was beautiful,’ she said. ‘Because it smelled like her grandmother’s garden. That is the thing I am always trying to do. Not to make something pretty. To make something that means something.’
Before I left, I asked her what she would put in a vase for herself, at home, on an ordinary Tuesday. She thought for a moment, then walked to the cutting table and picked up a single stem of white sweet pea, a stem of rosemary, and a stem of something I did not recognise — a wild-looking grass with tiny purple flowers. She put them in a jam jar and handed it to me. ‘This,’ she said. ‘This is enough. One beautiful thing, one scented thing, one wild thing. You do not need more.’ I carried the jam jar on the Métro, on the Eurostar, and all the way back to London. The sweet pea lasted three days. The scent lasted a week. She was right. It was enough.
