Inside Basa, the LA florist making bouquets for the stars

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A meeting with Melissa Brzuszek, one half of botanical studio Mizutama, was the spark that inspired freelance fashion designer and prop stylist Alice Lam to work with flowers. “It started out as a hobby,” says Lam. “I have a fear of being stagnant, so I’m always looking to acquire a new skill.” She started making bouquets and “little Valentine’s bundles” for her friends, finding it to be a good form of creative expression outside her day job. Slowly, “weekly orders started to trickle in”.

Four years later, her LA-based floral studio Basa has fully bloomed. Clients include British fashion designer Phoebe Philo (a big commission for her showroom included smoke bush bearded irises, sweet peas and clematis), Kim Kardashian (a fan of garden roses), Apple TV+ and most recently, Australian singer-songwriter Troye Sivan. “He is the most wonderful human and so collaborative,” she says. At the time of speaking, she is preparing arrangements for a dinner party at his Los Angeles home to celebrate his return from tour and house warming.

Alongside her A-list clients, she also arranges flowers for private parties, ranging from intimate supper clubs to “backyard soirées”, and restaurants. She will shortly deliver a swath of “campy” Christmas garlands to LA American-heritage-cooking restaurant Dunsmoor [hand-wrapped bouquets tend to start at $100; she has a minimum order of $200 for larger arrangements].

Lam creates her arrangements from an airy, white-walled, 450sq ft studio in LA’s Glassell Park, working with her husband, Gerard, and first assistant Hakyung Moon (Lam also produces a range of tote bags with her mother and their friend Maria). She describes her arrangements as being wild and “non-fussy”, rooted in traditional Japanese ikebana practices, which she is still studying with a former colleague and certified sensei. She says: “Ikebana strikes a perfect balance between intentional and effortless.”

Most of the blooms are sourced from a flower market in downtown LA and a specialist rose grower in the Valley. This time of year, she says, marks the emergence of evergreens, bittersweet vines, maple branches and end-of-season wisteria pods, her favourite new discovery. “I forage for them myself,” says Lam. “They’re fuzzy, a bit velvety and the most perfect sage green.” She might put them with spiky banksias and softer variants with larger flower heads like bearded irises and hollyhocks, both flushed with petals, for striking contrast. Another favourite winter combination is sweet peas paired with sculptural branches for a play on texture. The trick, she says, is in “using nature as its own mechanic: creating a natural cage inside a vessel by criss-crossing stems to skip the chicken wire, kenzan [flower frogs] and the foam”.

Wreaths will follow as the festive season draws closer. This year she is doing some classic styles made up of evergreens and some more modern arrangements spotlighting single materials, possibly including Norfolk pine. She sells these exclusively with Bucatini, a Mediterranean-themed grocery store in Eastside LA’s Echo Park, behind which Lam had her first official studio.

“I love working on a large-scale,” she says. “Bigger is more exciting.” Her aspiration now is to move into more set work; recently she did classic blue hydrangea clouds for the premiere of Ryan Murphy’s true-crime drama Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story on Netflix. With regards to the scale of the business, however, she’s wary of expanding too quickly. “I’m allergic to influencing; the idea of growing to 50K followers freaks me out. I’d like to keep Basa as boutique as possible, while still welcoming new opportunities.” At the end of the day, she says, “if this is going to be my own thing, I just want to have fun”.