Shilpa Reddy

Reddy's own account of the switch is characteristically direct, summed up in the three words that open her Instagram bio: "Doctor to Florist." She built the business slowly, first from her own kitchen table, before wedding bookings and press coverage from Gardeners' World Magazine, BBC Two, The Evening Standard, Metro and Stylist Magazine turned a career change into a full-time practice. Today the studio runs both sides of that story together: a working wedding florist by day, and a working flower-arranging teacher most evenings, a combination that keeps her hands in fresh stems even between bookings.

Where many London florists default to white and green, Reddy's own portfolio runs the other way. A ceremony arch built for one London wedding was dressed floor to ceiling in fuchsia rose, blue hydrangea and trailing clematis, set against a pale-blue ballroom rather than softened to match it. A rainbow-hued garden reception, dressed with a different coloured taper candle at every place setting, makes the same point at a smaller scale. It is a considered position rather than a house accident: colour, used generously and without apology, photographs as memorable in a way a muted palette rarely does.

That willingness to work in full colour extends naturally to multicultural ceremonies, and one of the strongest pieces in the portfolio is a Hindu wedding mandap, its silver-carved pillars framed in rose, dahlia and marigold beneath a canopy of white drape. It is a considerably more specialised brief than a Western ceremony arch, structural and symbolic and dressed for a different ceremony altogether, and the studio's evident comfort with it says something about the breadth of couples who come through Reddy's door in a genuinely mixed city. Building a mandap asks for a florist who understands the structure is doing two jobs at once, framing a ceremony and carrying real cultural weight, not simply a bigger version of a Western arch scaled up in different flowers.

The process itself is unusually collaborative for a category where a couple often just accepts whatever a florist proposes. Catherine, a bride who booked the studio for her own wedding, recalled how Reddy "listened clearly to our ideas and colour scheme and was diligent in her proposal," revising it more than once as feedback came back, before her team turned up "bang on time" on the day itself. Catherine's review makes a point of the sheer volume delivered too, enough to fill her own house and both sets of parents' homes afterward, considerably more generous than the example photographs had suggested.

The reception work ranges just as widely as the ceremony work. A gold urn arrangement of blush and peach rose, lit by a run of candles down a private dining table, sits at one end of the register; at the other, a long reception table for what looks like a countryside marquee wedding, dressed end to end in peach, pink and trailing green, runs the full length of the room rather than stopping at a single centrepiece. Both approaches appear across the portfolio, chosen, it seems, for what the room and the guest list actually need rather than one repeated look.

Two further rooms make the range plainer still. A garden reception, dressed with blue delphinium, marigold and a scatter of hand-painted taper candles among the wine bottles, reads as loose and informal, built for a marquee or an orangery rather than a ballroom. A separate, considerably darker room, panelled and candlelit, with a single arrangement of white rose at its centre, does the opposite: restraint used deliberately, in a space grand enough that it does not need to be filled.

The venues carry their own weight. A candlelit floral border at the entrance to The Berkeley in Knightsbridge, a pedestal arrangement built for a wedding at Coworth Park, the Ascot estate that belongs to the Dorchester Collection, and a LinkedIn recommendation naming her a preferred florist at the Shangri-La at The Shard, between them place the studio at the grander end of London hospitality, working to the standard those addresses expect rather than around it.

That reach extends beyond London too. The studio's own YouTube channel carries a short film of a rainbow-hued floral arch built for a wedding at Manor by the Lake in Cheltenham, and a second of an aisle dressed with faux topiary trees and a wildflower border at a barn wedding, alongside the Coworth Park pedestal film. None of the three is a polished cinema piece, each runs under ninety seconds, shot largely on a phone, but together they are useful evidence in their own right: proof of real, dated, named-venue work that sits outside the studio's own curated photography.

The reviews back up the same picture at scale, and not only on the wedding side. Birdeye, an independent review-aggregation service pulling directly from Google, currently shows the studio at a full 5.0 average, with zero reviews at four stars or below. A good number of those come from the flower-school side of the business: Julia Slowinska, who took one of the workshops, called Reddy "a warm, friendly, and knowledgeable instructor" whose "passion and expertise really shone through," the same calm, patient teaching style that a wedding couple would recognise from the planning process itself.

The flower school runs alongside the wedding studio rather than beneath it. Reddy teaches luxury flower arranging, terrarium making and Christmas wreath making to corporate groups and private individuals, hosts a weekly "Flower School Live" session for her Instagram followers, and has built a self-paced online course for anyone who wants to turn the same hobby into a business of their own. It is a genuinely two-sided practice, a wedding florist who also teaches the craft, rather than a teacher who occasionally takes on a wedding, and it means the skills a couple is paying for on their own wedding day are the same ones Reddy spends the rest of the week actively teaching other people to develop.

A third, quieter strand of the business supplies long-term floral installations, built in silk rather than fresh stem, to hospitality and retail clients who need a display that survives months rather than a single evening, the Rainforest Cafe in Piccadilly a credited example. That range, weddings, teaching, long-term installation, has drawn its own press interest, Gardeners' World Magazine, The Evening Standard, Metro, Stylist Magazine and two separate features tied to the Royal Exchange among them, alongside an appearance on BBC Two. It is the kind of coverage a wedding florist rarely attracts on wedding work alone, and it has followed a business built on a fairly unglamorous foundation: a kitchen table, a career change, and years of consistent, well-reviewed work rather than a single viral moment.

That colour instinct reads as a considered choice rather than a default. A safe, all-white scheme is easy to sell and easy to forget; a fuchsia-and-blue arch or a mandap in marigold and dahlia is the kind of thing a guest is still describing a decade later. It is a genuinely riskier position for a florist to take, since a bold palette can misfire in a way white rarely does, but the portfolio's own evidence, a run of five-star reviews and named work running from Coworth Park to the Shangri-La at The Shard, suggests the risk has paid off rather than merely survived.

None of it reads as a florist spreading herself thin. If anything, the range, weddings, workshops, long-term installations, corporate florals, looks like the natural output of someone who left one demanding profession for another and brought the same appetite for detail with her. A mandap dressed for a Hindu wedding, a jewel-toned arch inside a pale-blue ballroom, a candlelit entrance at The Berkeley: different briefs, the same instinct for colour used generously rather than apologised for. Enquire directly with Shilpa Reddy Flower Design on the Luxury Wedding Directory to check availability for your wedding.