Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The interior designer Rita Konig is seated on a vintage sofa in the kitchen-dining room of her smartly refurbished west London home. Swathed in a floral chintz of her own design, the sofa shows off the designer’s debut fabric and wallpaper collection created with Schumacher. Konig’s rose chintz print echoes a wider return of big, bold and unapologetically romantic flower patterns in homes. “We’re going back to florals,” she says. Call it nostalgia, or a hankering for an ever more remote natural world, but right now, when it comes to floral motifs, the blousier the better.“I have a real hankering towards a more 1980s mood,” says Konig, referencing designers including Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler and Mario Buatta, the so-called prince of chintz, who dressed every inch of clients’ homes – walls, curtains, floors and all – in exuberant florals. For Konig, her Elizabeth Chintz design, inspired by an early-20th-century French antique example, calls to mind her childhood bedroom that was decked in her mother, decorator Nina Campbell’s own debut design.“That moment when the Americans were really loving the English-country-house style is no longer horrifying,” she says. “But every time these things are adopted by the next generation, it’s done differently.” The floral mood now is looser and less matchy-matchy. Konig’s own flower-strewn sofa is counterbalanced by a heavy striped curtain: “You have to offset the frothiness.” But she’s not averse to full-room treatments, having recently clad a client’s Notting Hill bedroom entirely in a hollyhock print. “I really went for it – and it was really pretty.”It’s these kinds of rich, chintzy interiors, overflowing with antiques and collectables and drenched in floral motifs, that Jonathan Anderson conjured in his AW24 Loewe collection. Anderson was considering the rooms conceived by 1920s women decorators, and the provenance and meaning of the decorative objects they filled them with. Here, the motifs of chintzy wallpapers and enamelled Chelsea ceramics – the rococo, soft-paste porcelain popular in the mid-18th century – were thrown into sharp relief. Anderson translated their designs into trompe-l’œil beaded embroideries on dresses and bags, rendering the historical craft of floral textiles and ceramics instantly desirable. Further blousy prints proliferated on the AW24 runways everywhere from Erdem to Richard Quinn to Ulla Johnson.I’m never afraid to let flowers engulf a roomThe same generous, more-is-more spirit is running riot in the botanical world too. “Lovely growers in that Cecil Beaton mould such as Charlie McCormick and Arthur Parkinson, and florists such as Hamish Powell and Thierry Boutemy, are making blousy flowers fashionable again,” says Emma House, curator at the Garden Museum in London. Big stems in strong colours, once considered garish, are now all the rage. Parkinson’s flower installation inside the Arab Hall at Leighton House earlier this autumn saw him frame the interior’s fountain with a profusion of homegrown dahlias. “I love the silhouette of a blousy flower on a tall stem,” he says. “And I’m never afraid to let flowers engulf a room.”A similar abundance is on full display at the Garden Museum, where the American ceramicist Frances Palmer has packed the nave with 40 of her earthenware, porcelain and terracotta pedestal vases and pots (until 20 December) – filled with flowers. Palmer’s circular practice sees her grow flowers in the cutting garden of her home in Weston, Connecticut, before arranging them in her own vessels and photographing the lavish displays. “Frances creates these very contemporary forms,” says House. “But she is referencing history, from the tulipieres of the 17th century to Constance Spry in the 1950s. Her arrangements have that wonderfully over-the-top profusion of the Dutch still lifes.” It was society florist Spry who revolutionised the industry, bringing the extravagance of 18th-century arrangements to the masses – she wrote no fewer than 11 books on flower-arranging – and into the domestic sphere. The key to her style, says House, was the scale and unregimented quality of her displays. Spry’s resonance was felt afresh on the spring runways. At SS Daley, her sculptural creations formed the central stem in designer Steven Stokey-Daley’s womenswear debut. The SS25 collection pivoted on the moment in 1932 when Spry was commissioned to fill the new studio of British artist Gluck with flowers. The result sparked a period of intense creativity for Spry, a lifelong fascination with flowers for Gluck (who endlessly captured Spry’s garlands on canvas) and a four-year love affair between the two. Stokey-Daley pored over Gluck’s flower portraits, which Spry hung in her home and her “Flower Decoration” shop on Mayfair’s South Audley Street. His collection was a homage to the painter and their circle, with skirts threaded with hand-painted beads resembling Spry’s bouquets, while at the show the fragrant atmosphere of Gluck’s world was brought to life in an installation by the florist Nikki Tibbles of Wild At Heart.“Gluck happens to be my favourite artist,” says Tibbles. “When Steven showed me an image of shelves filled with Constance Spry vases, I thought, ‘I literally have all of them.’” Guided by the palette of Stokey-Daley’s collection, she and her team created colour-blocked displays of hot-pink, orange and blood-red blooms. “These were things that were very much in season, such as rose hips, dahlias and even vegetables, including ornate chard. Fashion is all about the seasons – and it felt fresh and vibrant to show things that were very natural in their movement rather than forced.” It’s about enjoying the abundance of what’s happening in nature nowShane Connolly, royal florist to the King, started out at Pulbrook & Gould, the London establishment whose co-founder, Rosamund Gould, was trained directly by Spry. “I’ve always been interested in reflecting the setting, and what’s growing at any one time,” says Connolly. For a recent party at his Worcestershire home, he filled the house to bursting with potted pelargoniums from his greenhouse. For Connolly, true blousiness is less about artifice than the wild and undone. “Trying to recreate Versailles is, for me, cruel to flowers – it’s about enjoying the abundance of what’s happening in nature now.” His advice on creating the look at home is to be generous with whatever you have to hand, whether that’s armfuls of wheat and daisies, or the cyclamen, amaryllis and nerines that he tends to turn to well ahead of Christmas.The symbolism of flowers is currently being considered anew at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where American artist Glenn Ligon has set in motion a salon-style rehang of the Flower Gallery – part of his major exhibition, Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place (until 2 March). Being immersed in the museum’s collection over the past few years led Ligon to consider the home and interiors of Henry Rogers Broughton, who bequeathed the Fitzwilliam his array of Dutch flower paintings. “I was thinking about that period of Dutch expansion,” says Ligon. “These flowers were coming from the colonies. They’re lovely but they’re also records of the empire.” Ligon had no idea it would take the museum more than a year to pull together, reframe and rehang the display – which, thanks to Ligon’s exploration of the collection, has grown from 15 to 75 paintings. As you stand in the space, it’s difficult not to be awed by these original OTT blooms. For Ligon too. “Thinking about the upheaval and politics behind the works only deepens the enjoyment,” he says. “A room full of Dutch flower paintings is still just incredibly beautiful.”
