When he was a child, there was a place in Lewis Miller’s head that didn’t exist. His colorful imagination created an orchestra of fantastical flora and fauna not knowing that, eventually, his dreams would become reality. “I am trying to create those places with the events I design,” says Miller, who opened Lewis Miller Design in 2002 after 10 years of working strictly within floral design. “With flowers, you get to shift the space and change the energy. I always want it to feel like you are stepping into a beautiful still life painting.”
As an event designer who is known for his conceptual use of flowers, Miller defines his approach as purely democratic. “When I first sit down with a client, I could care less what their favorite flower is,” says Miller. “What I need to know is how they want to feel and what mood they want to set. It’s a tactile thing, and the flowers are secondary to all that.”
Whether it’s the ballroom at the Pierre Hotel for hundreds of guests or an intimate dinner party for 25, Miller’s designs are consistently decadent without any pretense. Layers of flowers, plants, and vines weave their way throughout tabletops—leaving a space transformed on the surface while keeping the soul completely intact. “Like any good design, one thing can’t be the focal point,” he says. “And you’ll never get a sense of how much work we’ve put into it because it looks effortless.” Miller takes each environment he designs into account, knowing that the bones of the space are out of his control.
Still, the creative process can often be constrained by the whims and desires of clients. Three years ago, Miller decided to answer his own call for more artistic freedom with what has now been dubbed as the flower flash. “My comfort zone is under the radar with all things in my life,” he says of the secret floral masterpieces found along the streets of New York. “I need to be creatively stimulated for the hell of it with no client expectation or financial transcription. The only parameters were that it had to be fun and that it had to give back.”
First, he started with the fun. After an event, he and his team bundle up the leftover flowers and tote them all over the city, creating surprise compositions with blooms that would have otherwise been discarded in trash cans, covering up construction sites in the middle of the street, even cascading out of an abandoned car. “When we do a flower flash, they aren’t perfect,” he says. “They’re fast, it’s in the dark, and away we go.” Despite the lack of planning, the flashes garner the kind of attention that influencer dreams are made of—though Miller says that was never the goal. “When I create something, I truly believe I am solving a problem,” he says. “It’s a little selfish, but for me, spontaneity is the source of joy.”
