Marigolds generally do not thrive in 30 degree weather. However, on a cool March afternoon, they bloomed in golden bunches outside Bungalow, a new Indian restaurant in the East Village. The petals looked vibrant and flourishing, as did the man, Carlos Franqui, who expertly twisted them into a colorful arch that trailed around the entrance.
How had Mr. Frankie so deftly defied nature? The question seemed to bother the many passers-by who stopped drooling. Then a woman bent down to smell and discovered the secret of the flowers: They were fake. So were most of the plants and elaborate flower arrangements throughout the restaurant. Camellia leaves frame the entrance? Polyester. The ficus in the vestibule? Plastic. The bright pink roses on the tables? Real — and wilting.
Mr. Frankie, wearing thick-framed glasses and glossy hair, pointed to a charged, rose-gold nail polish. “My people don’t fall,” he said.
Sprawling, towering, flamboyant installations of fake flowers and leaves are fast becoming a new trademark of restaurant design, the lavish successor to past obsessions like open kitchens, Mason jars and battery-powered table lamps. In recent years they have appeared all over the United States and in cities such as London, Paris, Toronto and Lagos, Nigeria. They form high arches, climb the walls of the dining room and send their drills deep inside social mediawhere they light up many a weekend brunch post.
What began as a pandemic-era solution to dressing up al fresco dining has now transcended Plexiglas dividers and QR codes to become its own maximalist design movement, with Mr. Franqui as the leading trendsetter.
“It’s very much at the forefront,” said Alsún Keogh, a designer in New York who hired Mr. Franqui’s firm. Floratoriumin 2020 to cover the scaffolding outside the upscale Manhattan seafood restaurant Marea in blue and white waterfalls from false hydrangeas. “If you’ve done the installation from the Floratorium, it has a certain cachet.”
Bold florals may seem like a major departure from the minimalism and neutral hues that pervade big-city restaurants. But a similar shift occurred after the Great Depression, said Thomas Schoos, its founder School Planning in Los Angeles.
In the wake of hard times, “people want to live,” he said. “They want to be strong.”
Mr. Frankie, 45, is not the only purveyor of these artificial landscapes, but he is probably the most prolific. The Floratorium has installed his work in more than 300 restaurants in the United States and Canada, charging approximately $40,000 to $50,000 per project. (The typical monthly flower budget for a fine-dining restaurant is about $5,000, Ms. Keogh said.)
Demand is so high that Mr. Franqui recently opened an office in Miami to complement his warehouse in Wood-Ridge, NJ. It even has a trademark for the styling process called Biofauxlia. Recently a factory in China called him to ask who he is after they were buying so many of his fake flowers.
Mr. Franqui has won over restaurateurs who once swore by real plants with his overgrown arches of manufactured flora that look startlingly real: velvet-petaled orchids, Queen Anne’s lace with fragile embellishments.
“I don’t design as ‘design a layout,'” said Mr. Franqui, whose rich style is inspired by the rainforest environment of his Puerto Rican city of Fajardo. “I design as Mother Nature would design.”
Mr. Schoos, who has worked with Mr. Franqui, went a little further: “I can’t help but see this as the creation of a new art.”
Like any new artistic movement, this one is polarizing.
Paloma Picasso, an accounting office manager who was dining at Baby Bra in Greenwich Village, she said it was the flowers, more than the food, that drew her in. , let’s try it.”
But the displays also appeared last year in New York magazine list of hints that a restaurant is bad. The writer, Tammie Teclemariam, lamented the floral entryways and fake ivy walls as “the ultimate millennial-coded Instagram design.”
Fake flowers signal that a restaurant doesn’t care about maintenance, said Kristian Brown, a clothes salesman who dined at Recette, a French restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Plastic plants cannot photosynthesize, he added. “We need the oxygen.”
Love them or hate them, fake flora have come a long way from stiff specimens to funeral homes and craft stores. Sales of artificial plants and dried flowers reached $2.3 billion last year in the United States, up 52 percent from 2020, according to data analytics firm Circana.
While most florists chase weddings and bridal showers, Mr. Franqui, who used to work in advertising, says he’s always seen flowers more as a marketing tool.
When she sold clothes for the boutique retailer Mingle in the early 2000s, he took photographs in theaters and monasteries. “No one buys a $4,000 dress on a white plastic mannequin,” she said. “You have to sell the lifestyle.”
She started Floratorium in 2014, realizing that in the age of Instagram, she could help businesses by creating beautiful floral backdrops that customers could pose in front of. Their social media posts would be free advertising.
But to be cost-effective, the flowers had to last. The only solution was to go faux.
The first several years were slow, Mr. Franqui said. Some potential customers saw the fake flowers as tacky or worried that the plants would be vandalized.
That changed when the pandemic hit and restaurants had to make their rudimentary outdoor facilities look inviting. In the summer of 2020, Mr. Franqui created a French-country style dining shedof birch logs with rosemary, mint, lavender and hydrangeas woven throughout for French coffee Mum in Soho.
People flocked to the restaurant, said Elisa Marshall, the founder of the Maman chain, who then recruited Mr. Franqui to set up establishments in 32 more locations. He credits the flowers in part for the restaurant 187,000 followers on Instagram. “We are constantly being tagged with photos on a daily basis,” he said.
After Maman, Mr. Frankie’s phone kept ringing. “We did five installations a week,” he said.
Mr Franqui worried that business would falter when the pandemic passes and outdoor sheds become less important. Has not. Now restaurants also want indoor facilities.
“I couldn’t imagine opening a restaurant without having our tree.” said Tessa Levy, its founder Motekof which six Miami locations have wandering trees assembled by Mr. Frankie from laurel branches, wisteria vines, yellow mimosas and white bougainvillea.
However, she worries that if installations become too commonplace, hers might feel less original.
Mr. Franqui’s designs have a distinctive look. They start with braided branches of real curly willow and willow – both harvested in upstate New York. On top of the branches, Mr. Franqui layers foliage and flowers, bending and swirling them and making them look more natural.
Plant species should align with the restaurant’s cuisine, he said — not tropical flowers, say, at an Italian joint with red sauce. “I saw a lemon tree with a variegated ficus,” Mr. Franqui said. “I ALMOST died.”
The competition is tough. Mr. Franqui said rivals have tried to copy his style or go after the freelancers who help him build. A florist, Julia Testasaid she blocked Floratorium from her Instagram account because she was tired of Mr. Franqui being tagged in her drawings and vice versa.
Another challenge is city regulations. In 2022, the Floratorium took down an installation at Bar Americano in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, after the Department of Buildings sent the restaurant a notice saying the flowers were a fire hazard, said Steve Kämmerer, managing partner.
Mr Kämmerer said he was also frustrated by the expense and cleaning required for the flowers, which collect dust and soot.
But on a recent night, the city’s grime hadn’t dulled the burst of fuchsia bougainvillea outside Lola Tavern, a Greek restaurant in SoHo. As guests filed in, many stopped to pose for photos against the arrangement. And several said they either couldn’t tell or didn’t care that the flora was fake.
Alexis Varone, a stay-at-home parent, said that in this age of Instagram filters and heavily botoxed faces, she no longer has expectations for authenticity.
“It’s all fake,” he said. Why not flowers too?