Recipe for a reception-take a beautiful space, add flowers and table linens, stir in votive candles to taste and serve. But things are seldom as easy as they seem. Mood is created from a complex blend of elements carried throughout all the spaces of your wedding down into the tiniest details.

Just as an artist approaches a canvas, each with his own unique style, a floral designer approaches a space. The one right design is the one that matches your own tastes, regardless of whether your style craves extreme opulence, stark simplicity or anything in between.

"Never try to turn the Russian Tea Room into Calvin Klein," advised Michael George, one of New York's leading floral designers. "When you have an opulent setting, go with opulence." Select a room whose architecture and color scheme are intrinsically compatible with whatever mood you want to create. Then guide that space into a more modern interpretation of its original style. For example, the Russian Tea Room revels in its red plush extravagance reflecting the extreme luxury of a previous era. Instead of designing floral arrangements to match its dcor, George arranges five different types of roses in a graphic-art design of variegated shading and textures. "It's more simple, but it's evolved," George explained. "It still addresses the setting. Style is evolution, not revolution. If you want to take elements from the past, take ones that are fabulous-not ugly in their own day."

The same principle can also be used to bridge more extreme style gaps and create an informal mood in a formal setting. To design a reggae party in a stiff ornate Victorian room, George reinterpreted the room's decor by playfully transforming it into a somewhat "decadent" West Indian mansion. In establishing a mood, he advises against mixing styles. "Make it simple throughout or over-embellished throughout. Keep the mood. Simplicity is elegance, but it is very difficult to accomplish." Explaining that simplicity depends on attention to the smallest of unseen details, he warns that without that attention, it frequently turns out "a mess."

Avi Adler, another highly respected New York floral design firm, approaches room design as if it were a three-dimensional painting. David Stark, Avi Adler's partner, explains, "Color and scale are about art. In a way it's more fun than painting." Facing a ceiling of flying buttresses and dark carved walls at the "baronial" Armor Hall at Wave Hill along the Hudson River, they choose a park theme bringing the lawn and gardens of the estate indoors. Stark characterizes the concept as "all the different beautiful things of spring." "It's such a big room with such grand ceilings, it needs elements with scale," Stark explains.

An arbor is created from soaring "trees" that are actually long monochromatic arrangements of billowing vibernum, spirea, mock orange or scotch broom. Seated in tall black iron pots perched on long legs amid beds of wheat grass out of which whimsical multi-colored poppies "grow," they are the centerpieces for half the tables. The remaining tables have low domelike arrangements, each containing about a hundred vibrantly colored mixed flowers providing pools of deep color saturation.

Floral arrangements are carried unchanged into an adjacent less formal, smaller room, providing needed unity to a split reception and preventing guests "from feeling like they're in the wrong room." Charger plates, chairs, votive candles and table linens are kept consistent throughout, providing unifying and stabilizing elements to a very eclectic mix.

Floral designers focus on the entire space, not just the tables. At Wave Hill, Adler lines the windowsills with wheat grasses and poppy fields. Individual Sylvia Weinstock wedding cakes have three-dimensional leaves and flowers and even cookie party favors are in a floral theme. Escort cards grow out of fields of wheat grass. Wheat grass sprouts from red glass containers on mantles that match the containers for the votive candles. Even restrooms bloom with poppy fields...

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