Home— Convincing is the whole job
Convincing is the whole job
An artificial plant either passes as real from a metre away or it doesn't. Everything below exists to make sure ours does — and keeps doing it in year ten.
Realism
What gives a fake plant away
Almost never the shape. It's the uniformity. Injection-moulded foliage repeats the same leaf a hundred times at the same angle in the same flat green, and the eye catches the repetition before it consciously registers why something looks wrong.
So we work against uniformity on purpose. Each leaf is cut from silk and pressed against a mould taken from a living cutting, which means the vein pattern is a specific real leaf rather than a generic one. Leaves are then colour-graded across four tones per species and set at varying angles, with a proportion deliberately imperfect — slightly curled, a little pale at the tip, occasionally chewed.
Materials
What's actually in one
Four components, chosen separately. The trunk is the part most brands cut corners on, and the part you touch first.
Silk foliage
Cut from woven silk rather than moulded polyester, so leaves catch light with a soft sheen instead of a plastic one. Every batch is treated with a UV inhibitor before assembly — this is what stops the greens turning grey-blue in a sunny window, which is the failure that ages a cheap artificial plant fastest.
Cured natural wood
Real trunks and branches, harvested from trees already felled for timber, kiln-dried and sealed. The bark keeps its texture and its irregular taper. Composite trunks are cheaper and always look extruded, because they are.
Internal armature
A wire spine through every stem, so branches can be bent to your room and stay where you put them. It also means a piece can be reshaped after storage rather than arriving permanently flattened.
Stoneware and cement
Pots are fired stoneware or cast cement with a weighted base, sized so a 1.8 m tree doesn't tip when a door slams. Every tree ships potted and set — no separate pot to buy, no polystyrene to hide.
Quality
Three tests, before anything ships
The metre test
Every piece is photographed beside its living counterpart at one metre, in daylight. If the two are easy to tell apart in the frame, the sample goes back to the maker. It's a blunt test, and it fails more samples than anything else we do.
Hours under lamp
Foliage samples spend 1,200 hours under a UV lamp — roughly a decade of indirect indoor light. We measure the colour shift against the original. Anything with a visible change is reformulated before it reaches the range.
Shipped and unpacked
Every new piece is boxed, couriered, and unpacked three times by someone who didn't pack it. If it needs more than a minute of fluffing to look right out of the carton, the packing gets redesigned, not the instructions.
Selection
How a piece joins the range
In order, because the order matters — we commit to a species long before we commit to a supplier.
Choose the species
We start from rooms, not catalogues. Which real plant would suit this corner, and why does it keep dying there? Olive, fig and eucalyptus all earned their place this way.
Buy the living one
We buy the real specimen and keep it in the studio. Moulds are taken from its leaves, and its colouring becomes the reference the samples are judged against.
Sample and reject
Three makers, three samples each, judged on the metre test. Most rounds fail. The Aurelia Fig took eleven samples across fourteen months before one passed.
Live with it
The winning sample sits in a real home for ninety days before we order. Dust settles, light moves, and flaws that a studio bench hides become obvious.
The promise
Thirty days to change your mind
Every piece ships with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Live with it, move it around the room, see how it reads in your own light. If it isn't right, return it unused in its original packaging for a full refund of the item price.
- Guarantee 30 days from delivery
- Condition Unused, original packaging
- Return postage Yours, unless faulty or incorrect
- Faulty on arrival Email us within 48 hours