Winter Splendour Artificial Flower Arrangement

Red and white done with enough variety and skill that it never tips into festive cliché.

Red dried hydrangeas with their generous, wine-toned heads. Red rose buds with hand-curved petals. Red skimmia with heavy, clustered blooms. Tall red berry stems rising above everything. And balancing all of that, white garden roses, hellebores with their delicate downward-facing cups, white ranunculus sprays and snowberry branches with their small cream clusters.

The foliage is what stops it from feeling like a Christmas arrangement. Bracken fern, two types of eucalyptus, salal leaf and pittosporum build out the green in layers. Pussy willow stems add bare, woody height. Black berries and seed pods introduce a darker, wilder element.

White willow sprays and silver berry sprays cool everything down. There's a depth to the supporting stems that you only notice when you look closely, and that's the sign of an arrangement that was properly thought through.

At 90cm and 41 stems, it fills a room. Living rooms with high ceilings, wide entrance halls, large dining tables, hotel lobbies. It needs a vase with weight and a wide mouth to hold the spread. Matt ceramics or tinted glass both work.

It's a luxury arrangement that looks like someone spent an hour styling it this morning. Tomorrow it'll look exactly the same. And the day after that.