Abandoned Detroit House Gets Adorned with 4000 Flowers

What does it look like when you give florists 48 hours to fill an old, abandoned house with flowers? These photos, taken by photographer Heather Saunders, are from the trail run of Flower House, an exhibition planned in October that will fill 15 rooms of a dilapidated Detroit home with between 60,000 and 100,000 flowers. For the preview event, it took florists 48 hours and 4,000 flowers to transform a neighboring house into a wildly beautiful wonderland.
Lisa Waud, the creator of Flower House, has had a floral design business called Pot & Box for five years. After seeing images of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapped Pont Neuf bridge in Paris and Christian Dior's 2012 couture show, Waud had an epiphany. "I knew I had to create my own house of flowers and invite as many people as possible to experience it with me," she stated. She found it surprisingly easy to get florists on board with her vision. "The Flower House October installation will be an unprecedented one," she wrote. "We will experience something that has never been done before—for one weekend, the walls, ceilings, floors, and fixtures will be bursting with luscious blooms and textural foliage harvested from American farms coast to coast, and featuring our own Great Lakes state. There is a real and strong momentum gaining for consciousness in growing, sourcing, and buying flowers grown in our own soil. Much like the Slow Food movement, the Slow Flowers Movement is changing the way people think about where their cut flowers come from in America."
The house will be open to the public from Friday, October 16, to Sunday, October 18. Visitors will be able to witness the unique setting before the house gets torn down and replaced with a living, growing flower farm. "The goal is to dismantle the structures and divert as much 75% of the reusable materials out of the landfill," she states. "The hope is that this deconstruction and land repurposing will inspire others to see abandoned structures as platforms for art and business, and to use them in an environmentally responsible way." Waud also sees the project as a way to give the house "one last hurrah" before it gets torn down.