Audrey Hilfiger wants flowers to feel alive, not overly arranged

I’m Audrey Hilfiger, founder and creative director of Audrey in the Garden, a floral design studio based in New York and working between New York and Los Angeles. We create florals for events, fashion and brand activations, installations, sets, and private clients.

My approach to flowers has always been very visual and instinctive. I think of flowers as a medium, almost like paint. I’m interested in color, shape, movement, texture, and creating something that feels alive rather than overly arranged.

My introduction to the world of flowers really came from my British grandmother. She had an English garden on the Upper East Side, which felt like this magical little world tucked into New York City. I grew up surrounded by the flowers she planted and cared for, and I think that’s where I first developed this sense of wonder around gardens and the way flowers can completely transform a space and a feeling.

That stayed with me as I got older. Flowers became a way for me to express myself creatively and eventually a language of their own. Audrey in the Garden grew from that very personal relationship with flowers and from wanting to create work that felt emotional, imaginative, and transportive—the way my grandmother’s garden felt to me as a child.

Right now I’m especially interested in expanding the idea of what a floral studio can be. We’ve been doing more installations, set design, brand activations, and projects where flowers interact with unexpected materials and environments.

I’m also working on a book centered around flowers and nature, but really it’s about life through flowers—family, love, heartbreak, friendship, work, and all of the different seasons we move through as people.

For me, it always starts with a feeling. I think about the feeling I want to emulate, the story I want to tell, the person I’m designing for, and the space I’m designing within.

From there, I start to think of each flower almost as a character within that story. What role does it play? How does it move through the space? How can I highlight what is already beautiful or unusual about it rather than forcing it to become something else?

I’m very interested in allowing flowers to have their own personalities. The finished work comes from bringing all of those individual characters together to create one feeling and tell one cohesive story or maybe it’s not cohesive at all. That’s the point.

Completely. I don’t really separate them. I’m constantly looking at paintings, fashion, interiors, gardens, objects, food, architecture—anything that has an interesting relationship between color and form.

Gardening is especially important because it reminds me that nature isn’t perfectly symmetrical or controlled. A garden has different heights, things growing through one another, something dying next to something blooming. I try to bring some of that imperfection into my work.

I’m always drawn to flowers that have personality and movement—ranunculus, anthurium, calla lilies, sweet peas, clematis, dahlias, hydrangea, interesting orchids, and flowering or seasonal branches. I love vines and things that can trail or create a gesture.

At the moment, I’m also interested in incorporating flowers with materials that aren’t traditionally floral—moss, fruit, food, found objects, and sculptural elements. I like when you have to look twice and figure out where the flowers end and the rest of the environment begins.

Impermanence. Flowers force you to appreciate something knowing that it isn’t going to stay exactly as it is.

There’s something freeing about making something incredibly beautiful that is never meant to be permanent. A flower opens, changes, wilts, and eventually dies. I think working with them has taught me to be more present and to understand that something doesn’t have to last forever for it to be meaningful.

Develop your own eye before worrying too much about what everyone else is doing. Inspiration is everywhere, but it doesn’t have to come from other florists.

Go to museums. Look at old books. Walk through gardens. Pay attention to what people are wearing, how someone sets a table, the colors in a grocery store, or the weeds growing through a crack in the sidewalk. The more you build a visual world that is genuinely your own, the more naturally your work will begin to have its own voice.

And learn from the flowers themselves. You don’t always have to force them into an idea. Sometimes they already know what they want to do.