A floral fireplace for Fleurs de Villes DIANA at Somerset House

I have a floral fireplace in Fleurs de Villes DIANA, the exhibition in support of The Diana Award in the East Wing Galleries at Somerset House, open until 6 October 2026. It is my second year showing with Fleurs de Villes, alongside more than two dozen of Britain's leading floral designers. The code DIANAFLORAL10 takes 10% off a ticket.

The load-in was at eight in the morning on Tuesday 15 September, through the gates on the Strand, with a van full of flowers that had been built the day before and a room I had only ever seen in two photographs.

In those photographs the fireplace was almost nothing: a marble surround on a white wall, a black opening, wide wooden floorboards, and a great deal of empty space around it. That emptiness is the brief. Each fireplace in the show is a small room of its own, and the job is to make someone stop in the doorway.

Somerset House is not simply a beautiful venue. It is one of the most historic buildings in the country, and driving into the car park that morning already felt like an occasion. The real challenge was the building itself: in a historic house every surface has to be cared for, and the humidity from fresh flowers can damage old floors and the walls around a fireplace. Finding a protective layer that kept both safe was, honestly, a relief.

A second year with Fleurs de Villes

Last year my first Fleurs de Villes show was Downton Abbey at Kew Gardens, where I made an interactive floral photo station in the marquee on the lawns beside Kew Palace: garden roses, sweet peas and delphiniums, in the manner of an English country house that has never once been tidy.

This year the show has moved indoors, to Somerset House, and the subject is Diana, Princess of Wales. Fifteen floral mannequins reimagine some of her most remembered looks, and around them are the installations: entrances, arches, a floral heart, and the fireplaces.

The fireplace

The brief was generous about colour and strict about everything else. Every fireplace needed its own colour story, so that no two rooms felt alike. And everything had to stay within the opening or sit tight against the surround, because nothing may protrude into a room that thousands of people will walk through.

What I built is a deconstructed English garden. Rather than a symmetrical arrangement framing the mantel, the flowers grow across it the way a garden grows over a wall: a soft white and ivory base of garden roses, spray roses and gypsophila, then violet and blue delphiniums rising up one side, purple clematis trailing through them, and ammi and astilbe keeping the whole thing light. Down the other side it falls to the floor in a cascade. How it stays standing for three weeks without a single fixing is its own story, about the mechanics.

The piece answers Diana's 1981 bridal bouquet. Her wedding dress is not in the exhibition, which was always a private matter for her, but almost everyone remembers seeing her as a bride on a worldwide broadcast, and she remains an icon of beauty. I got married myself just a month ago, which made this year's piece feel especially close.

Sharing the rooms

The part I find hardest to describe is how it feels to walk the show once your own piece is finished.

The fireplaces alone include work by Claridge's Flowers, Jade Loftus Floral Design, Debrah J Flowers and Yan Skates, and the full list of designers runs to more than twenty-five studios from across the country. The British Florist Association team took Best in Show. These are people whose work I have studied since I started out in Chile, and I am genuinely happy to be sharing the building with them, and a little astonished to be doing it for the second year running.

It is also a useful thing to see so much of other people's work in one place. You notice what you would have done differently, and occasionally, what you would never have thought of at all.

Visiting

• Where: East Wing Galleries, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
• When: 16 September to 6 October 2026, timed entry
• Tickets: fleursdevilles.com/diana
• Discount: the code DIANAFLORAL10 gives 10% off one ticket
• A portion of every ticket supports The Diana Award, the charity set up in her memory to support young people who are changing the world around them
• You can vote for a Fan Favourite on the way out

If you go, look for the fireplace with the delphiniums. And if you take a photograph of it, I would love to see it.

A fireplace in a gallery is a strange thing to fill with flowers, because nobody is ever going to sit beside it. It has one job, which is to be looked at, and there is something freeing about that.

If you have a room, a venue or an entrance that needs to stop people in the doorway, that is the work I love most.

Photography by Veronica Castillo (@byveronicaphotography) for Fleurs de Villes.

Written by Javiera Troncoso, founder of Hana Blossom. Epsom, Surrey.