Fresh out of university, I interviewed with a platform that sold homeware. At some point the founder asked me what my dream was, and without hesitation I said: to set up my own shop, selling things that I love. He laughed and said that could be a problem — I’d end up his competitor someday.
Life went the way it does. I spent a few years in a corporate job, and when I decided to start my own business, the reasoning was practical: I wanted work I could do from home once I had children, and I wanted it running before they arrived. What I’d build it on was never really in question — I’ve been good with my hands all my life. As a child I loved anything crafty: stuffed toys, crochet, later botanical painting, and somewhere along the way, floristry. Some of it didn’t last. Flowers stayed.
Perhaps they were always going to. I grew up watching my mother forage, arranging what she found for the home and for Japanese tea ceremonies. Flowers were part of the house before they were ever part of me. So Still Life began as a floral studio, and for years that was the whole of it.
But being a florist taught me to see things sideways. I’ll be honest about vases: most of the time, they’re empty. Even in a florist’s home, flowers are an occasion more than a constant. So I chose vessels that could hold their own without a single stem. And anything can be a vessel if it holds water — a carafe made for wine, holding flowers instead. Fruit and vegetables on the table not to be cooked, but simply to be looked at; the old paintings knew that one long ago. Somewhere in all this, without noticing, I’d stopped being someone who only chose flowers. I was choosing everything the flowers touched.
Last year, I finally decided it was time to return to the dream I’d had from the very beginning.
So here it is, at last: a shop selling things that I love. Flowers, objects, and in time, art.
When I named the studio Still Life Floral, I chose a name that could hold more than flowers — still life, the old Dutch paintings of objects on a table, the very direction I hoped one day to go. The name was a promise I made quietly and took years to keep.
— Shilbe