For an elegant holiday table, Nisha Kelen filled large glass cylinders with water and orchids, then surrounded them with pale green carnations and milky white Glassybaby votive holders.
Design Report
Natural Palette
Floral designer Nisha Kelen of Fleurish shares secrets of her trade for non-traditional holiday décor


Kelen covered cones and spheres with mosses and grapevines to decorate the hearth of this contemporary fireplace designed by Bennett Lavacot Architecture.


Kelen lights the candles to add a warming glow to her winter wonderland table setting.

Floral design is a seductive business, and few know that better than Nisha Kelen, the owner of Fleurish, a floral design studio on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

Kelen combines textures—a sleek flax leaf next to a cluster of spiky Echinacea, for example—to create sensual arrangements that tempt and tease. And she plays with a diverse color palette as well. “I’m also a painter, using oils and acrylics to create abstract paintings,” she says. “Because of that I gravitate toward unpredictable hues.”

As a freshman in high school, Kelen got her first job working at a florist shop. “When I started in floral design, I thought of it simply as a creative outlet,” she recalls now. “It wasn’t until I was 30 that I realized that this was my profession.” More than just a vocation, floral design became a passion for Kelen—and has grown into a unique and innovative business.

Since she started her company in 1997, it has flourished, mostly by word of mouth. Many of her clients entertain frequently and all have “a discriminating eye for tasteful arrangements,” she says.

“What separates me from a lot of designers is that I’m very hands on,” Kelen says. “I talk to my customers. I try to understand what they are trying to communicate, and then I let the flowers tell their story. I go to the flower market every day and start fresh. I hunt through the new shipments, trying to discover what seduces me most.”

After 25 years of floral design—13 of them in Seattle—she is still constantly collecting new ideas. “I feel like I live in a Petri dish—my work is an ongoing experiment,” Kelen says.

She also gathers inspiration from her travels: From Japan, she learned simplicity, the singular impact of one flower. From France, she picked up the pavé, or “cobbled” style—“flowers are clustered and the arrangement is compact, as opposed to an open, airy country style,” she explains.

These days, Kelen is experimenting with tone-on-tone, an approach that she can spin toward earthy, elegant or unexpected. To demonstrate, she agreed to create three holiday arrangements for Seattle Homes & Lifestyles and to share some secrets of her trade. Kelen notes that all three designs are simple enough for readers to try at home.

“I’m inspired by the wildness around us here in the Pacific Northwest. Our landscape is green-on-green, soft and mossy,” she says. An angular fireplace in the contemporary Seattle home of David Bennett and Kim Lavacot, of Bennett Lavacot Architecture, set the stage for spheres and cones, their geometry blurred with mosses and grape vines. Glitter evokes the sparkle of raindrops in the woods.

For this arrangement, Kelen tied the shapes together with boughs of Douglas fir, but she also recommends using evergreen magnolia leaves, especially those with “suede” undersides. “Arranged alternatively upwards and down, their shiny and fuzzy surfaces create contrast,” she says. “A large mantel can be done this way, threaded with long, wide, ribbons of burlap.”

Kelen’s simple style translates well to sophisticated table settings. She recalls a memorable corporate dinner party that had a “color scheme” of platinum, white and silver. “We set huge glass cylinders on uplighting fixtures and filled them with water and white orchids. The linens were matte platinum and the tables were adorned with white candles. The scene shimmered like a winter wonderland or a scene in a glass snow dome.”

“It’s easy to create a similar look at home by setting a wreath of pale green carnations around a cylinder of white Dendrobium orchids.” Pale green hints at Christmas but remains understated, Kelen says, confessing that she has an aversion to the red-and-green holiday palette. “Use accent colors that are a bit surprising,” she advises instead. “Combine robin’s-egg blue with chocolate, or add mango to creams and whites.”

As an alternative to a traditional wreath, Kelen and her staff at Fleurish demonstrate innovative, European-inspired sensibilities by creating a tidy square studded with white and green carnations.

Modest about her reputation and achievements, the designer focuses more on her public love affair with flowers, which is most often displayed in the homes, offices and event spaces of her clients. “Like my work, my own home is minimalist. The color comes through my artwork,” she says of her own private space. “People imagine that a floral designer’s home must be filled with flowers, but I’m happy with a single ranunculus in a bud vase by my bed.”

This holiday season, let Kelen’s sense of floral adventure inspire you to enliven your home with arrangements that are calming, captivating and a little bit unconventional.

Fleurish (1308 E. Union St., 206-322-1602 or fleurish.com) is open by appointment only.

Carolyn Jones has worked in all areas of horticulture in the Pacific Northwest, most recently as director of Great Plant Picks.