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A CHAT WITH... R OWA N C O T T E R I L L

There’s not much that Rowan Cotterill (Te Ātiawa, Puketapu ki Kāpiti, Ngāti Te Whiti) doesn’t know about flowers. The 35-year-old owner of Paraparaumu’s Love Stomp Floral spent eight years in London doing interesting things with flowers for clients such as David Beckham, Ralph Fiennes and the TV show Downton Abbey. The mother of Alba, 4, tells Sharon Stephenson about the joy of flowers and clients who spent $300K on them for one event.

You come from a creative family. Wasn’t it inevitable that you would also have a creative career? My late father was a musician and my mother Takiri is a harakeke weaver. My older brother Ra Vincent, a film production designer, was nominated for two Academy Awards – for the first Hobbit film and for Jojo Rabbit. I went to art school in Nelson and then Wellington but it wasn’t practical enough for me.

Did you always want to be a florist? As a child, I remember my grandmother hosting old lady flower groups at her house. I’d sit under the table and watch things fall to the ground. When I was 20 Mum enrolled me in a floral course where I found my groove. I was good at it and it didn’t feel like work.

But you didn’t work as a florist for a while? I moved to Melbourne for two years but the money was better in hospitality so I did that. There’s no such thing as a rich florist, this is a passion job. I worked at the Crown Casino and would stare at their amazing floral arrangements and miss floristry. So when

I got to London in 2011, I vowed to get back into it.

Did you? I spent a year working for standard flower shops, which was fine but I really wanted to do creative and cool work. I got a job with Jayne Copperwaite Floral Design, which specialised in film and TV work, especially for period dramas. I’m a big English history nerd so I loved it. We did a lot of the weddings and centrepieces for Downton Abbey. I’d take the flowers to set between midnight and 3am and then have to return to refresh them. I also worked on the Mr Selfridge TV series.

How did you end up meeting so many famous people?

After three years I got a job with Nikki Tibbles, a famous English florist, at her Notting Hill store. I knew that having Nikki’s name on my CV would open doors. It was a really popular shop and I served everyone from singer Lily Allen, who was really nice, to a certain Harry Potter actor who kept asking me to repeat the message he was sending. I think he was taking the mickey out of my accent.

He wasn’t the only one?

Jeremy Paxman, the journalist, would come in and ask me to say “fish and chips”. It was a bit of fun and no-one was ever rude.

What was David Beckham like?

Really nice but also the cleanest, most “put together” person I’ve ever met! Everything about David looked new and trimmed. And he drove a red Lamborghini. Hugh Grant would turn up in a red Ferrari.

You also did the flowers for one of the Murdoch family parties?

That was crazy. We decorated a barn at their Cotswold home with something like $300,000 worth of flowers. Some customers also spent $5000 a week on flowers for their homes.

Weren’t some of the weddings you worked on also super high-end?

Yes, especially some of the Jewish and Arabic weddings. Brides would say, I want to spend more than my sister did for her wedding, and sometimes that was upwards of $350,000 on the flowers alone. It’s the kind of thing I’d never have been exposed to here.

What about the customer with the $60,000 Lalique vase?

He only wanted calla lilies so every week we go to his house and the house-keeper would get the vase down and stand over us while we arranged the lilies. He would pay us $1000 a week even if the flowers only cost $200.

Why did you come back to New Zealand?

I was tired of 18-hour days and going to the Covent Garden Flower Market at 3am. I also missed Mum and had fallen in love with a Kiwi guy so we came back in 2017. After doing a few weddings while on maternity leave, I realised it was time to open my own shop.

Why did you call it Love Stomp?

Every time my family gets together we line-dance to Boney M’s Rivers of Babylon, a dance we refer to as the love stomp. For me, this business is about people getting together and having a joyful time. Flowers are a piece of art and when you give someone flowers, you’re giving them art, beauty and joy.

“When I was 20 Mum enrolled me in a floral course where I found my groove. I was good at it and it didn’t feel like work.”

Whakawhiti Kōrero / Conversations

en-nz

2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282660396555668

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