Simone Gooch is redefining floristry in Sydney
After nine years in London, the Australian florist who created Nicole Kidman’s wedding bouquet is bringing her distinctive style back to Sydney.
Simone Gooch, founder of Fjura floristry studio, returned to Sydney after nine years in London for many reasons.
To be closer to family. To swim in the ocean. But also, gardenias.
“I missed gardenias a lot because there were no gardenias in London,” says Gooch during a visit to her spare and calming temporary space in Sydney’s Paddington. Indeed, unusually for a florist’s, when WISH visits the studio has hardly any flowers. Yet it is extremely sensory. It beguiles people walking by.
“There was this lovely guy who must live on this street. I was sitting outside and he said, ‘Is this yours?’ as he was walking by and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘It’s just so beautiful, so beautiful’,” says Gooch, smiling at the memory.
“And then I was in here a couple of days later and he walked past and he said, ‘I’m an emergency doctor and this is heaven to me’.”
Gooch, known for her sculptural yet minimal approach to floristry, understood what he meant. “I think it’s just the sparseness of it and the white … I really love the space and I think it’s a different experience for people to see a space like this.”
Gooch’s first job was in a florist, doing the kind of grunt work that’s hardly the stuff of grand inspiration yet turned out to be formative. But it was in her early years, spending time with her grandparents as a child, that instilled in her a love of working with her hands and making things.
“To work with my hands makes me happy. Conditioning and arranging the flowers. Cooking. Gardening. Arranging objects. My nannu, my grandfather in Maltese, loved growing fruit and veg in the backyard and making and fixing things in his little workshop in the garage. My nanna, Maltese for grandmother, was an amazing cook. [She] made clothes, gardened and was very house proud. I love manual work and what you can create with your hands. The simplicity is really beautiful,” she says.
Gooch has been described as “not your average florist”. Tastemaker Alex Eagle of the Alex Eagle Sporting Club lifestyle brand calls her “the absolute best”. Previous commissions for Fjura, which is the Maltese word for flower, include Hermès, Chanel and Burberry. She’s worked on installations at Frieze Masters and Sotheby’s and a book with photographer Derek Henderson. In her earlier days before leaving for London, she did the flowers for Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s 2006 wedding.
One of Gooch’s brides – she doesn’t do many – recently commissioned her to landscape her gardens in Sicily. It is a project Gooch is happily undertaking with her friend John Tebbs, founder of The Garden Edit, author of The Avant Gardens who is known for his philosophy of the “anti-garden”.
“I’m so excited,” she says of this decidedly new kind of project. “It’s early stages, but John is quite knowledgeable … he has the knowledge about the plants … and he is into regenerative planting. Aesthetically we work really well together.”
Her plans for a return to Sydney remain fluid. There was February’s short-term exhibition space in Paddington, but Gooch is mainly working behind the scenes in her Marrickville studio. She will return to London and Europe for certain projects.
Earlier in her career Gooch says she was inspired by 17th-century Dutch masters when looking at the composition of flowers. She travelled often to Japan when living in Sydney and to Rome (her “second home”) while based in London. She says it was working with Saskia Havekes at Grandiflora that helped her to shrug off those early experiences in a run-of-the-mill florist shop and realise that floristry could be “something really beautiful”. Now she says her work is more a question of feel. “I think now when I arrange it’s more intuitive, I just kind of go do it,” she says.
This applies to staying creatively inspired, too. “I’m quite a visual person, so I absorb visual things. And that’s usually through architecture, gardens, the visual arts. And I think the time in Europe has informed what will happen next in my work,” Gooch says.
Currently she’s reading, and feeling inspired by, a book by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, who was known for refining Portuguese modernism. Gooch also collects vases from all around the world. Mostly though she only has one or two single flowers in her own home at a time.
“Always a gesture of something, like a broken gardenia, or something,” she says.
It was after going out on her own (“I got a little card printed out”) that Gooch says she found her way to her own style.
“When you have your own business and your own physical space – I had a little studio – you sort of just start experimenting. You can just do your own thing really, can’t you? I think not long after that, I went to Japan and I love Japan and I feel like that really informed my work as well,” she says.
“I align with the wabi-sabi philosophy. I believe there is beauty in imperfection. But saying that, I am particular about placement and the attention to detail in my work.”
Other than arranging flowers, which Gooch describes as her happiest, most meditative place, she loves both sourcing flowers and meeting the growers.
Flower growers, she says, are mostly pleasingly eccentric in the way that truly passionate people tend to be. “One of my favourite things is going to see the colours and see the flowers. I had this beautiful supplier for bearded iris two hours outside of London. They’re quite a wild, huge sort of iris, very seasonal, with these sort of beautiful watercoloury colours, really incredible colours. And that was always a joy,” she says.
Gooch doesn’t even mind the bleary early mornings that comes with buying flowers at the market. “I love the mornings. I love seeing the sky come to light
and the energy is really soft in the morning. Here [Sydney] people get up a lot earlier than they do in London, though. It’s like people are around at 5.30 in the morning. In London, it’s a really late start. So the morning is quite a beautiful time,” she says.
If Gooch was to distil her philosophy down to a single idea, it would be the flower: “The flower is the muse. I am very focused on sourcing special flowers.”
Which is not to say that there is only one way to see beauty in bloom. She mentions a client in London in whose home she installed flowers weekly. “I’d go there once a week. And not all flowers last for the full seven days, but [the client] always used to comment about how she enjoyed watching them through their life, even if they were dead, she’d liked to observe them and watch them.”
“I think that’s quite rare. People tend to think that with flowers, once they start to turn, then they don’t see the beauty anymore. So I thought that was really beautiful and I’m an advocate for that,” Gooch says.
Ultimately, her work remains a passion but where it takes her, well, that’s still to be determined. “I feel like I’ve moved to London, I’ve come back. I feel like I do go with how I feel in my heart and that philosophy of just going with the flow. When you do that, challenges are a little bit less. You’re not fighting against something,” she says.
“Working with flowers can be hard work. It’s physically hard work. The early mornings, ask any florist, it’s just such the maddest job ever. I find it really addictive. And if you speak to other florists, they’d say the same. It’s a labour of love, definitely. But it’s brought me a lot of joy and so many wonderful opportunities that I’m grateful for.”
This story is from the April issue of WISH.
