Back at the Battersea Arts Centre

The Grand Hall at Battersea Arts Centre is one of the more demanding rooms we work in, in the best sense. It is a restored Victorian interior with an enormous amount of character already in it, and anything you put in the middle of it has to be able to hold its own without competing.

The Single Birch was the right answer, and this time the couple’s florist covered it completely.

Birch is the structure florists ask for by name, and this is why. Because the poles branch naturally, arrangements can be wired into the forks at every height rather than fixed along a straight rail. The finished chuppah reads as though it grew in the room rather than as flowers attached to a frame – which, in a hall with that much architectural detail, is the only approach that would have worked.

The Single Birch uses one pole at each corner and stays light and open. For a full covering in a larger room we would usually steer couples to the triple, which pairs poles at each corner and carries more weight. Here the Hall was doing enough of the visual work that the lighter structure was right.

Every birch chuppah we build is slightly different, because the poles are hand-selected and no two trees branch the same way. It is the one design where we genuinely cannot show you a photograph of exactly what you will get.