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If you are in the middle of wedding planning, you might be wondering how to transform your venue in a way that is both dramatic but also interesting. Gone are the days of putting flowers on the table and calling it a day. Every blog and wedding magazine is plastered with gorgeous floral installations from cover to cover. Today, we’re giving you 9 different ways to use a dramatic floral installation to give your wedding venue the look you always dreamed of!

Organic Shaped Floral Clouds

Nothing draws the eye in more than movement. Creating suspended organically shaped clouds of floral is one of our specialties here at Life In Bloom. Straight hedges of floral don’t cut it for us. There is no imagination, no interest in that. For a really eye-popping and awe-inspiring moment, we recommend creating a series of floral clouds hung at different heights throughout your wedding venue. You can use many different flowers to achieve your desired aesthetic. Below are two examples, one from a tented wedding in the North Shore, and another at The Old Post Office in Chicago.

Floral Ring

A Classic Ring of floral is another great way to add drama over the dance floor in a more formal/traditional way. A ring is a symbol of marriage, so we say, why not go big with an oversized ring of floral as the focal of your wedding reception. Below is both a colorful floral ring that we designed at The Renaissance Chicago, and also a white (and green) floral ring designed for a wedding at The University of Notre Dame’s football stadium venue.

Suspended Structure with Floral Explosions and Chandeliers

Creating a suspended architectural structure is a fun way to transform your venue. Throw in some dramatic explosions of floral and globe chandeliers, and now we’re really talking! For Molly & Kyle’s wedding at The Peninsula Chicago, we suspended a soft blue open frame structure and designed a beautiful organic display of delphinium, hydrangea, and Italian ruscus which snaked around the structure in an artful way. We hung crystal globe chandeliers from the structure at varying heights .

Floral Ceiling

For the flower lover, you can never have enough flowers. So we suggest creating a full on ceiling of floral. You can design it above your ceremony stage, like we did for Carly & Mike’s wedding at The Langham Hotel. Or you could design it above the dance floor, like we did for Hannah & Michael’s wedding at The Peninsula Hotel. There’s no wrong answer. As we always like to say, more is more!

Trees

At some wedding venues, you don’t always have the option to suspend from the ceilings. In that case, we suggest creating drama from the ground up. Literally. For Annie & Michael’s wedding at The University Club of Chicago, the Life In Bloom team designed a mini-forest throughout the space by constructing (8) 16′ tall trees throughout Cathedral Hall. Throw some dramatic uplighting on the trees and it was truly a room transformed!

Dried Floral Installation

Sometimes, all you need to do is introduce a more interested floral recipe to your suspended pieces! For Sheila & Camden’s wedding at Morgan Manufacturing, we created these organically shaped floral pieces above the dining tables using dried and preserved florals. The recipe even included tumbleweed!!!

Lunaria Floral Garland

One of the things that I think we at Life In Bloom do as good as (if not better than) any florist out there, is creating sculptural art as our floral installations week after week. It takes a strong understanding of the fresh product to understand how you can manipulate and work with different flowers and foliages to create something interesting and unique. Take for example this weaving Lunaria garland that we created as a focal moment about this exquisite dining table at The Chicago Illuminating Company. This was for a very intimate wedding at the tail end of Covid and despite being a small guest count, the impact was extraordinary!

Layers (Chandeliers, Pendants, Greenery, Floral, Drapery)

You know that thing I said earlier about how “more is more”? Well, for your maximalist loving heart, consider designing in layers. For this wedding at The Chicago Botanic Gardens in Glencoe, IL, we designed an incredibly dense and impactful ceiling using greens, florals, drapery, chandeliers, and pendant lighting. The result was truly magnificent!

Crystal Chandeliers With Cascading Florals

Crystal Chandeliers: Timeless, Classic, Elegant. Now, add in a couple hundred floral stems and you can really elevate things… (pun intended). For this gorgeous wedding at Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest, IL, our team used nearly a thousand blooms of Hydrangeas and Phaelonopsis Orchids to give these three large crystal chandeliers this lush aesthetic. Simple yet dramatic floral installations that had guests talking for years to come.