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Despite being eight months pregnant, Tattie Isles is up a ladder, painting the ceilings of her west Dorset cottage. “I’m fresco-ing anything that sits still long enough,” she laughs. Next week, she plans to finish the ambitious “rural Dorset chinoiserie” design she has planned for the sitting room, featuring the apple trees she can see from her windows and the local birds, from thrushes to peacocks. The only worry? Her three sons feel emboldened to follow suit. “I’ve found little scribbles on corners of walls — but it’s quite hard to tell them off about it.”
This bucolic image belies her more glamorous work life. Isles, 37, is the most exclusive wedding florist — she hates that term, preferring “botanical artist and set designer” — you may never have heard of. She creates large-scale fairytale installations with flower budgets of more than £250,000, for the weddings of the rich and famous — from celebrities such as Ellie Goulding to German aristocracy and the Jordanian royal family.
Those are the names she can mention, the rest are hidden behind non-disclosure agreements, such as her most recent nuptials in Venice, which tabloids reported was the wedding of solar panel billionaire David Winter, with Sienna Miller as a guest. “Most of my high-end clients want to keep the event just for them and their guests, and I love that. I like to keep the magic, and not reveal everything.” Refreshingly, she’s someone who panics about her Instagram follower count rising too high.
But recently she has been keen to create floral experiences “that have a longer life”. That has meant projects such as crafting giant silk hand-painted flowers for designer Lulu Guinness’s current Blenheim Palace exhibition, and a print she designed for the fashion brand Kurt Geiger’s summer collection, painted from the flowers outside her window. The collaboration came after Isles went for a slice of cake at the brand creative director’s house in a neighbouring village, and she sent a hand-painted thank-you card. Now she gets a thrill from seeing her work plastered over hats, bags and shoes.
Her work involves 18-hour days, often up ladders, craning in 4m-high trees and co-ordinating boat and lorry loads of flowers. It is, she says “very physically demanding”. But she loves the theatre of it all. For one wedding, noting the bride’s penchant for ladybird-themed jewellery, she “bought lots of ladybirds from a garden supplier, put them under cloches on the tables, and we released them into the fields in a dramatic cloud after the dinner”.
Isles can trace her creative drive back to den-building as a child in the woods near Kirkcudbright on the west coast of Scotland while visiting her granny. “My cousins and I would build these enormous dens, using branches and trees. We’d improve it each year, until one year it was cleared away. Which, in retrospect, was quite magical — it only exists in my memory.”
An artistic child, Isles got an early job with a Dorset-based florist. “I didn’t have any real interest in flowers when I applied but it quickly set me on fire.” She followed that with 80-hour weeks on a flower kiosk outside Clapham train station (“which didn’t teach me much about flowers but a lot about people”) to save for her own venture, which she launched in 2010, specialising in her now-trademark wild, otherworldly designs.
The early days of Tattie Rose Studio involved up to 35 events a summer. Some of the antics sound Herculean: getting flowers to the top of mountains in northern Sweden in -20C on horseback or transporting them to marquees on pontoons. There have been near-disasters along the way, such as an errant deer that nibbled the arrangements in the marquee or a well-meaning church warden who cranked up the overhead heaters the night after the team installed hanging branches of blossom and delicate spring flowers. But Isles employs a healthy degree of pragmatism. “We take it seriously but you do remember that there are more important things going on in the world.”
What drives her is the power the natural world has to decorate a space. “Flowers are one of the first things we seem to collectively decorate with,” she says. “If someone is coming for dinner, often you have a vase of flowers on the table.” In her own home, however, she prefers potted scented geraniums throughout the house, or “a single stem of something exquisite in a bud vase. Perhaps because I’m such a maximalist at work, I love a minimalist approach to flowers at home.”
Her floral contribution to her own home — former farm workers’ cottages built in the 1770s — is through the murals. Aside from this late-pregnancy flurry, she has enjoyed decorating their home slowly. “My mother, who as an army wife was amazing at making a new home feel special in moments, taught me that you shouldn’t rush to paint walls. Instead, you should live with them, see where the light falls, and then decide on how you want the room to feel.” It’s the same approach she takes to creating a colour palette with flowers.
“I don’t really start with deciding on a colour. I ask clients to send me pictures of objects they love, be it a book cover or the inside of a coat lining, and see what patterns and colours come from that. It’s a more instinctive way of decorating.”
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