Sweet Pea Floral Design

The studio's own account of its style is unstructured and often asymmetric, with stems recessed and foliage left to trail rather than trimmed into a fixed shape. It is a deliberate kind of imperfection, the sort that takes more skill to achieve than a tightly wired arrangement, and it gives Sweet Pea's work a quality that reads as gathered rather than assembled, closer to how flowers actually grow than to how a catalogue displays them.

That instinct is grounded in where the flowers come from. Marianne and her team have sourced blooms from UK growers wherever possible for more than a decade, still making the early trip to the flower market themselves to hand-select stems and foliage. Waste flowers and plants are donated to Flower Angels, a charity that promotes wellbeing through flowers, and packaging is recycled wherever the studio can manage it, a quieter kind of craft discipline that sits underneath the more visible work.

The scale of the work ranges from a single bridal bouquet to a full venue transformation, and the studio is equally at ease at either end. For Emily and John's wedding at The Ned in London, the brief was a modern, romantic city wedding, and the arrangements followed suit: unstructured and often asymmetric, movement achieved through considered placement rather than volume, low displays in ceramic footed bowls that tied the mantelpieces to the welcome table in a single, quiet palette of white, blush and nude.

A different commission shows the same studio working at a very different register. For Scott and Paul's wedding at 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, the brief was an elegant City wedding, and the centrepiece was what the couple themselves called a "staircase of dreams": floor-standing meadow flower displays lining the aisle, leading to two large urns and a mantelpiece display, with clusters of vintage crystal vases on the tables filled with seasonal summer roses, delphinium and astilbe in a muted palette of white, blush and dusky pink.

Reading the two weddings side by side is the clearest way to understand what the studio is actually selling. It is not a single look reproduced at different scales, but a design process applied fresh each time: a first consultation about the day and the venue, sketched and sampled concepts before anything is confirmed, and flowers chosen at market in the days beforehand rather than ordered months in advance from a fixed list.

The venues themselves do a lot of the talking. Sweet Pea has dressed Claridge's, The Ned, The Lanesborough and 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, alongside Temple, St Paul's Cathedral, Syon Park and Kew Gardens, and is recommended for weddings by The Barbican, the Landmark Hotel, St Pancras Renaissance Hotel and Gordon Ramsay's restaurants. Outside weddings, the client list includes Tate, the Natural History Museum, Mappin and Webb and Linda Farrow, evidence of a studio as comfortable with a brand launch as with a bridal party.

At Gaynes Park, a barn wedding venue in the Essex countryside, Katie and Josh's wedding leaned into that outdoor setting directly: a floral installation built onto the exposed brick and timber of the barn itself, cascading dahlia and rose in cafe au lait, blush and white, a hanging table plan finished with the same palette rather than treated as an afterthought. The wedding was later featured on Rock My Wedding and in Perfect Wedding magazine, recognition that tends to follow real, photographable craft rather than the other way round.

The smaller pieces get the same attention as the showpieces. Bridesmaids' bouquets are matched to the bridal flowers in colour but built at a different scale, buttonholes are pinned in person rather than couriered ahead, and a hanging table plan or a welcome sign is dressed in the same trailing foliage as the ceremony arch, a detail easy to skip but one that keeps a whole day feeling considered rather than themed.

At The Lanesborough, Atisha and Fran's brief was more ambitious still: to bring an entire forest indoors for a day that ran from the ceremony through to the wedding breakfast in the hotel's five-star suite. The studio's answer was a 9ft by 5ft foliage wall, built from a huge variety of seasonal greenery, with blowsy white peonies and warm garden roses in silver bowls down the reception tables, connected by beakers of trailing herbs and lit almost entirely by candlelight.

It is worth noting what that kind of installation actually requires: a foliage wall of that size is closer to structural work than flower arranging, built to hold its shape and stay upright through an entire event without a single visible support. The studio's comfort with large-scale, load-bearing installations, staircases, walls, floor-standing urns, is what lets it take on a brief like "bring the forest in" and mean it literally rather than decoratively.

None of this happens without recognition following it. Sweet Pea was named one of Harper's Bazaar's Top 10 Wedding Florists and one of the Telegraph's 20 Most Creative Florists, the Telegraph noting that "this most urban of florists is certainly inspired by nature, sourcing English flowers and foliage whenever they can." The studio's work has also been featured in Conde Nast Brides, Hello and You & Your Wedding, a spread of coverage that tracks with a studio built for both intimate weddings and the grandest London addresses.

Not every couple needs a foliage wall or a floral staircase, and the studio has built a separate offer for exactly that: a Ready to Wear collection of off-the-peg bouquets, buttonholes and arrangements, designed for smaller and more intimate weddings and ordered online rather than through a full consultation. It sits alongside event flowers, flower delivery across London and Hackney, workplace flowers, and a Flower & Plant School running workshops in terrariums, bridal work and bouquet-making, a spread of services that keeps a studio capable of a nine-foot installation equally available to a couple who need something much simpler.

The pattern across the studio's reviews is consistent rather than occasional. At Kew Gardens in September 2023, Samantha and Dhulshan wrote that the flowers within the Nash and the Orangery "totally surpassed our expectations in every way," a description echoed in dozens of other named, dated testimonials on the studio's own site stretching back to 2017. For a florist working across as many distinct venues and styles as Sweet Pea does, that kind of repeated, specific praise is a more reliable signal than any single review on its own.

Marianne is candid about what drives the studio's look: a balance between the relentless pace of the city she was born and raised in, and a craving for the peace of the natural world. It is this tension, rather than a single fixed aesthetic, that shows up across the portfolio, from a foliage wall built to feel like a forest inside a five-star hotel suite to a bridal bouquet built to look as though it was picked that morning rather than ordered from a shop.

The studio's reputation is built the same way, one wedding and one testimonial at a time. Scott and Paul, married at 10-11 Carlton House Terrace in July 2022, wrote afterwards that "our entrance arch, Ceremony displays and staircase arrangements were stunning," and called Marianne "a true professional, an outstanding florist." It is the kind of review that tends to follow a studio that treats each wedding as its own brief rather than a repeat of the last one.

The studio itself sits some distance from the grandeur it regularly delivers: a working atelier in Hackney, a few streets from the Downs, full of buckets and vessels and whatever the market yielded that morning. It is not an incidental detail. A florist based among the ordinary rhythms of an East London high street, rather than in a showroom built to impress, tends to design for the wedding in front of them rather than for a house style, and it is one reason the same studio can dress a cathedral chapel one month and a barn in the Essex countryside the next without either feeling like a compromise.

A wedding's flowers last a single day; the photographs of the staircase dressed in meadow blooms, the foliage wall standing in for a forest, the bouquet carried down the aisle at Claridge's or The Ned, are what remain. For a couple who want their flowers built around a considered idea rather than picked from a package, Sweet Pea's decade and a half at some of London's most storied addresses is difficult to match. Explore Sweet Pea Floral Design on the Luxury Wedding Directory to see the studio's full profile and enquire about your wedding.