Marigolds don’t generally thrive in 30-degree weather. Yet on a cool March afternoon, they bloomed in golden bunches outside Bungalow, a new Indian restaurant in the East Village. The petals appeared perky and thriving, as did the man, Carlos Franqui, expertly twisting them into a colorful archway that crawled around the entrance.
How had Mr. Franqui so deftly defied nature? The question seemed to vex the many passers-by who stopped to gape. Then one woman bent down to take a sniff, and discovered the flowers’ secret: They were fake. So were most of the plants and elaborate flower arrangements throughout the restaurant. The camellia leaves framing the entrance? Polyester. The ficus in the vestibule? Plastic. The bright-pink roses on the tables? Real — and wilting.
Mr. Franqui, sporting thick-rimmed glasses and slicked-back hair, pointed an accusing, gold-painted fingernail at the roses. “Mine don’t droop,” he said.
Sprawling, towering, flamboyant installations of faux flowers and leaves are fast becoming a new hallmark of restaurant design, the florid successor to past fixations like open kitchens, Mason jars and those cordless tabletop lamps. In the last few years they’ve sprung up across the United States and in cities like London, Paris, Toronto and Lagos, Nigeria. They form soaring arches, climb up dining room walls and send their tendrils deep into social media, where they brighten many a weekend-brunch post.
What began as a pandemic-era solution for dressing up outdoor dining sheds has now outlasted plexiglass dividers and QR codes to become its own maximalist design movement, with Mr. Franqui as a chief trendsetter.
“He is very much at the forefront,” said Alsún Keogh, a New York City designer who hired Mr. Franqui’s company, Floratorium, in 2020 to cover the scaffolding outside the luxe Manhattan seafood restaurant Marea in blue-and-white cascades of fake hydrangeas. “If you have the installation done by Floratorium, that has a certain cachet.”
Bold florals may seem a major departure from the minimalism and neutral hues that pervade big-city restaurants. But a similar shift occurred after the Great Recession, said Thomas Schoos, the founder of Schoos Design in Los Angeles.
In the wake of hard times, “people want to live,” he said. “They want to be loud.”
Mr. Franqui, 45, is not the only purveyor of these artificial landscapes, but he’s likely the most prolific. Floratorium has installed its work in more than 300 restaurants across the United States and Canada, charging about $40,000 to $50,000 per project. (The typical monthly floral budget for a fine-dining restaurant is about $5,000, Ms. Keogh said.)
Demand is so high that Mr. Franqui recently opened a Miami office to supplement his warehouse in Wood-Ridge, N.J. He has even trademarked his styling process under the name Biofauxlia. A factory in China recently called him just to ask who he was, since he was buying so many of its fake flowers.
Mr. Franqui has won over restaurateurs who once swore by real plants with his overgrown archways of manufactured flora that look startlingly real: orchids with velvety petals, Queen Anne’s lace with frail frills.
“I’m not designing as ‘I’m designing an arrangement,’” said Mr. Franqui, whose lush style is inspired by the rainforest surroundings of his Puerto Rican hometown, Fajardo. “I’m designing 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 art movement, this one is polarizing.
Paloma Picasso, an accounting-firm administrator who was dining at Baby Brasa in Greenwich Village, said it was the flowers, more than the food, that drew her in. “You just go in, and with the intrigue of the flowers and seeing that it is a nice place to take a picture, you’re like, let’s try it out.”
But the displays also turned up last year on New York magazine’s list of tipoffs that a restaurant is bad. The writer, Tammie Teclemariam, bemoaned floral entryways and fake-ivy walls as “the ultimate in millennial-coded Instagram design.”
Fake florals signal that a restaurant doesn’t care about upkeep, said Kristian Brown, a clothing salesperson who was dining at Recette, a French restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Plastic plants can’t photosynthesize, she added. “We need the oxygen.”
Love them or hate them, faux flora have come a long way from the stiff specimens in funeral homes and craft stores. Sales of artificial plants and dried flowers reached $2.3 billion last year in the United States, a 52 percent increase from 2020, according to the data analytics company Circana.
While most florists chase weddings and bridal showers, Mr. Franqui, who used to work in advertising, says he always saw flowers as more of a marketing tool.
When he sold clothes for the boutique retailer Intermix in the early 2000s, he staged photo shoots at theaters and monasteries. “Nobody is buying a $4,000 dress on a white plastic mannequin,” he said. “You need to sell the lifestyle.”
He started Floratorium in 2014, realizing that in the Instagram age, he could help businesses by creating pretty 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 clients saw fake flowers as tacky, or worried that the installations would be vandalized.
That changed when the pandemic hit, and restaurants needed to make their rudimentary outdoor setups look enticing. In the summer of 2020, Mr. Franqui created a French-country-style dining shed, made of birch logs with rosemary, mint, lavender and hydrangeas woven throughout for the French cafe Maman in SoHo.
People flocked to the restaurant, said Elisa Marshall, the founder of the Maman chain, who then enlisted Mr. Franqui to create installations in 32 more locations. She credits the flowers in part for the restaurant’s 187,000 Instagram followers. “We are constantly tagged in photos on a daily basis,” she said.
After Maman, Mr. Franqui’s phone just kept ringing. “We were doing five installations a week,” he said.
Mr. Franqui worried that business would falter when the pandemic passed and outdoor sheds became less important. It hasn’t. Now restaurants want indoor installations, too.
“I wouldn’t imagine opening a restaurant without having our tree.” said Tessa Levy, the founder of Motek, whose six Miami locations have rambling trees that Mr. Franqui assembled from laurel branches, wisteria vines, yellow mimosas and white bougainvillea.
Still, she worries that if the installations become too common, hers may feel less original.
Mr. Franqui’s designs have a distinct look. They start with braided branches of real curly willow and wisteria — both harvested in upstate New York. Onto the branches Mr. Franqui layers foliage and flowers, bending, twirling and fluffing them so they look more natural.
The plant species should align with the restaurant’s cuisine, he said — no tropical flowers, say, in a red-sauce Italian joint. “I saw a lemon tree with a variegated ficus,” said Mr. Franqui. “I almost died.”
Competition is fierce. Mr. Franqui said rivals have tried to copy his style or poach the freelance workers who help him with construction. One florist, Julia Testa, said she blocked Floratorium from her Instagram account because she was tired of people tagging Mr. Franqui in her designs, and vice versa.
Another challenge is city regulations. In 2022, 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, a managing partner.
Mr. Kämmerer said he was also put off by the expense and cleaning required for the flowers, which collect dust and soot.
But on a recent night, the city grime hadn’t dulled the burst of fuchsia bougainvillea outside Lola Taverna, a Greek restaurant in SoHo. As guests strolled in, many stopped to pose for a photo against the arrangement. And several said they either couldn’t tell or didn’t mind that the flora were fake.
Alexis Varone, a stay-at-home parent, said that in this era of Instagram filters and heavily Botoxed faces, she has no expectations about authenticity anymore.
“Everything is fake,” she said. Why wouldn’t the flowers be, too?
