THE SUPERB AND UNEXPECTED ON EVERY PAGE
STAY CONNECTED
THE COLLECTION
EVERLASTING BEAUTY
As the desire for attractive spaces increases, Winward Home’s new line of luxurious lifelike blooms intends to visually and permanently please and bring a home to life.
JESSICA HALL
We are born to take pleasure in looking, just as we take pleasure in food, warmth, and companionship. It’s a survival strategy, one that helps us hone our visual perception in babyhood and beyond. Skill in looking let early humans distinguish “cues to understandable, safe, productive, nutritious, or fertile things in the world,” as the great psychologist and writer Steven Pinker puts it. On the primeval savannah, survival depended on looking. More recently, our ability to look and the pleasure we take in doing so led to art. Here, perception is also vital.
Art focuses on visual stimuli, just as cooking focuses on flavor. As civilization has gone on, the recipes have become more complex, and our palates are more sophisticated. Liking the unlikable may be key in modern art – it marks us as sophisticated, and you have Picasso to blame for that – but we have a predisposition for the elegant forms of nature. The visual acumen that allowed us to discern what was good for us in nature led to art; conversely, what we like to see in art are the shapes we find in nature.
Garrison Tai, President of Winward Home, whose motto is to make beauty permanent, clearly understands this concept. His company creates strikingly gorgeous faux floral arrangements that are considered to be the world’s most realistic flower botanicals that will never lose its luster. And nothing adds a touch of luxury like a spectacular floral arrangement. Daily, these works of art are shipped to the hospitality industry, office spaces, and estates in the wealthiest zip codes.
Crafted and assembled in the USA, each flower is made using the finest materials, and the stems are hand-painted to achieve stunning realism. The finished blooms are then expertly styled in designer vessels to complete the arrangement. The arduous process “all begins in nature,” reveals Tai. Real flowers are carefully selected, and each petal is placed into plaster and steel molds. To capture the flowers’ realistic look and feel, various materials are chosen to mimic each flower’s precise thickness, feel, texture, and transparency. Entirely by hand, each petal is painted, curled, and assembled. “Our premium faux floral arrangements represent the highest quality of craftsmanship from hand-cutting, hand-dying, hand-painting, and hand-crafting each flower petal by petal to produce the most beautiful and most realistic faux floral available today. Our pre-made arrangements are then hand-assembled in the USA by our designers within our domestic production and undergo the strictest Quality Control,” explains Tai.
Winward Home started very focused on high-end faux floral, plants, and trees. Today, they are now a full-fledge home décor company offering decorative lamps, vases, and wall art to enhance and tie everything together. The design team recently created a new diverse portfolio of collections, each celebrating a different interior style. Take the delicate blue and white Chinoiserie patterning of the Highland Park Collection, for example, or the bold, sophisticated lines of the Manhattan Collection, which evoke urban elegance. Natural materials and rich textures are celebrated in the Urban Collection, and the Rutherford Collection will transport you to the Amalfi Coast, with a palette of earthy ceramics and rich blues. For the perfect festive touch, they have even crafted a collection of wreaths and garlands.
The ways in which faux botanicals have evolved are quite riveting and have never been more popular. The low maintenance of artificial blooms provide instant decoration and are actually cost-effective. If your staff can’t manage to keep your plants alive, then these luxury faux arrangements are probably the best option for you.
