Zita Elze

Before she was a florist, Zita trained in artistic bookbinding in Paris, then interior design at London's KLC School of Design, then landscape and garden design at the Inchbald School, where she graduated with a distinction. That final project, a therapeutic garden in Italy, won her the 2003 Design & Decoration Award for Graduate Garden Designer of the Year, and she opened her first shop in Kew the same year. The route into floristry was unusual, but it shows: Zita designs a wedding the way a garden designer approaches a site, working outward from a feeling rather than a flower list.

Her own account of the process is unusually psychological for the trade. A bride will ask for "something special," and Zita responds not with a colour chart but with a question: what does the day feel like? Her florals have been built around themes as varied as elation, fireworks and summer picnic, and, for grieving clients, loss and silence. The flowers are chosen to speak for themselves rather than simply to match a dress, which is why a Zita Elze wedding rarely repeats a design. Every couple gets an original, not a variation on the studio's usual palette.

In 2009, Zita brought an exhibit called A Celebration of Life to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show and left with a silver-gilt medal, the first major recognition of a technique she had spent years developing: Living Embroidery, real flowers and foliage hand-stitched directly onto fabric rather than pinned or glued. It is a genuinely different discipline from bouquet-making, closer to couture than to floristry, and it remains, more than fifteen years on, something almost nobody else in British wedding flowers attempts at the same scale or with the same technical control.

The technique grew into a full collection: sashes, veils, circlets, hairpieces, bags and jewellery, all hand-embroidered with fresh flowers and known collectively as the Living Embroidery Collection. In October 2014, Zita took a couture bridal gown inspired by Sleeping Beauty, hundreds of fresh roses, hyacinths, delphiniums, hydrangeas and wax flowers stitched onto a deep-cut bodice, to Brides The Show, and won the Condé Nast Brides Editor's Gold Design Award. She won the same award again in 2016. Few wedding florists anywhere have been recognised twice by the same couture-level prize.

Zita was appointed RHS London Floral Artist in Residence in 2018, creating three separate installations for RHS shows in Westminster and a public art project in Victoria for London Design Week. It is a credential usually reserved for florists working at institutional scale, and it sits alongside a client list that has included Brides magazine's own cover shoots: "when we need fabulously styled flowers," the magazine wrote in 2013, "one of the first calls we make is to Zita."

The press has followed consistently rather than occasionally. Love My Dress founder Annabel Beeforth called her "undoubtedly one of the most talented floral artists in the world," and Brides editor Jade Beer wrote, after one exhibition, that Zita had "topped all expectations." Zita's floral embroidery has been documented across British MODE, The Florist magazine and years of bridal press coverage, evidence that the recognition has come as much from the editors who watch the industry closely as from award panels.

Teaching has always run alongside design. The Zita Elze Flower School, founded in 2010 as the Zita Elze Design Academy, has grown into one of the leading floristry schools in the world, training students from bridal bouquets to full event concepts. Many of its own students have gone on to build acclaimed floral careers of their own, and Zita and Laura both still teach there, passing on techniques that took decades to develop, including versions of the Living Embroidery method that made the studio's name.

The studio's creative direction has, in recent years, passed to Zita's daughter Laura, who joined the family business after graduating from the Florence Institute of Design in 2017 and initially managed suppliers and the shop's day-to-day running. As Zita has gradually spent more time back in Brazil, Laura's own instincts have moved to the centre of the work: a regular at New Covent Garden Flower Market, she now leads the studio's floral output and teaches alongside her mother at the ZE Flower Academy, carrying a rarefied, heartfelt design language into a new generation of weddings.

Weddings remain the core of the business. The studio's own process is simple to describe: a consultation covering the bride's outfit, the venue, the season and the elements that matter most, followed by hand-tied bouquets, headpieces, veil trims and full venue decoration built around whatever theme that conversation surfaces. Event flowers, deliveries and subscriptions, editorial shoots and one-to-one classes all sit alongside the wedding work, but it is the weddings, hand-tied at the same Kew workbench since 2003, that the awards and the embroidery collection both grew out of.

The clearest demonstration of what the studio can do arrived in February 2023, on a wedding day Zita did not merely design but attended as mother of the groom. Her son Alvaro married Lisanne at Schloss Weißenstein in Pommersfelden, Germany, and Zita, working with Laura, planned the entire concept: the flowers, the dress embroidery, the styling, down to the smallest detail. Laura was a bridesmaid. It is, by some distance, the most personal wedding in the studio's portfolio.

Schloss Weißenstein supplied its own inspiration before Zita added a single stem. The frescoed ceiling above the palace's main staircase, painted in 1713 by the Swiss artist Johann Rudolf Byss, depicts the four then-known continents in a resplendent scene framing Apollo and his sun wagon, its subtle natural palette lifted by rich highlights. That colour story runs straight through the wedding's florals. The palace, which also houses one of Germany's largest private Baroque art collections and doubled as a filming location for Netflix's The Empress, gave the day a setting few wedding venues could match.

Lisanne's dress was designed by Louise Selby, with a bodice hand-embroidered by Zita using the same Living Embroidery technique she debuted at Chelsea in 2009: soft lilac and creamy-white delphiniums define the upper section and float down the skirt and train, echoed in a floral headdress holding her veil. Her bouquet answered in the same palette, pure white sweet peas and café au lait dahlias blended with pale pink astilbe, spray roses, achillea and more delphinium, an exquisite tapestry of gossamer and lacelike textures built to photograph as softly as the dress itself.

Outside, foxtail lilies and wild grasses added height and drama, arrangements leading up the chapel stairs to sandstone urns filled with foliage that Zita, Alvaro and his best man foraged themselves from the woodlands surrounding the Schönborn family's estate. Inside the chapel, peaches and pinks underscored the gold detailing and ancient wooden pews. The bridesmaids wore orange, their bouquets carrying Coral Butterfly ranunculi to pick out the colour, and the wedding stationery, designed by Nadia Chin Studio, took its own inspiration from a historic copperplate engraving of the palace.

The Fairytale Palace wedding was a singular commission, but the studio's everyday work carries the same instinct for atmosphere over template. Real couples describe being "stunned" walking into a church dressed by Zita, candelabra and orchids that guests asked to take home, tables so admired that, in one bride's words, "the walled garden looked the very best that it has ever looked." Another couple recalled flowers dramatic enough that guests took every stem home at the end of the night, the same design instinct at every scale, from a country church to a Bavarian palace.

What holds a Zita Elze wedding together, whether it is a single posy or a hand-embroidered couture gown, is the refusal to separate the flowers from the feeling they are meant to carry. A bouquet is asked to say something specific: elation, or loss, or the particular quiet of a fairytale palace on a wedding morning. Two decades after Zita opened her first shop in Kew, that instinct, now carried forward by Laura, is still what a couple is really booking. Explore Zita Elze Flowers on the Luxury Wedding Directory to see the studio's full profile and enquire about your wedding.