Autumn is here, which means it was time to create something special again.
This time, I wanted to do something completely different.
I have been decorating this café for every season for quite some time now, but this summer, the exterior really caught people’s attention. The decorations received national recognition and were also featured on television and in a magazine.
(You can see some of the previous seasonal displays in How to Decorate a Storefront Exterior for Every Season and Behind the Scenes: Decorating a Storefront for Christmas.)
When it was time to plan the autumn display, the expectations were a little higher than usual. The owner wanted to keep the momentum going and make sure we didn’t hold back, especially after receiving so much interest from people.
So, back to the beginning.
We needed something different and something that would have a real visual impact.
Forgetting the usual color palette
For the previous decorations, I had always worked with the café’s brand colors, pink and dark blue. Even the previous autumn decorations used pink and purple tones.
But autumn itself suggests a completely different color palette.
So this time, we decided to throw the usual rules out the window and let autumn do the talking.
The color palette became yellow, orange and brown, combined with dried flowers, leaves, branches and other natural materials.
And there had to be a lot of it.
The goal was not a few tasteful autumn details. I wanted the whole entrance to feel abundant and unmistakably autumnal.
Starting with an AI visualization
At first, I collected inspiration from Pinterest and other social media. But when you are decorating a specific building, general inspiration is only part of the process. You eventually need to figure out what will actually work on that particular façade.
This is where AI visualization came in handy.
I gave AI instructions to decorate the entrance in the style I had in mind and added a few reference images to show the colors, shapes and overall feeling I was looking for.
Let’s just say it took quite a few attempts before the result started to look both right and realistically achievable.
And this is something to keep in mind when using AI for design inspiration: you still have to use your own judgement.
AI is very good at creating a beautiful overall image, but it does not necessarily understand real-world proportions, materials or how things behave outside.
In my visualization, some of the flowers and leaves were much too large. The maple leaves were also arranged in perfectly balanced little compositions, which would be almost impossible to achieve in real life.
But that wasn’t really the point.
I wasn’t planning to copy the image exactly. I was using it to understand what ingredients would be needed to create the same impression.
What colors were important?
What types of materials?
How large did the elements need to be to have enough impact?
How much abundance was necessary?
Those were the useful answers I could take from the image.
Breaking the image into pieces
Once I had chosen the visual direction, I started taking the image apart.
What plants were being used? What colors, textures and shapes? Which elements were essential to the overall look?
Then came the practical question: what could I actually get?
Some things could be bought from a shop. Some could be collected from nature. And quite a few things were already available.
I knew I wanted to use a lot of natural materials, partly because there is an incredible amount of free material available in autumn. The trick was simply to collect things in the right color palette so that everything would still work together.
How much do you actually need?
Once I had decided what the individual elements would be, I had to work out how much of everything I needed.
This was slightly more difficult because the AI visualization wasn’t exactly accurate when it came to scale.
This is where mock-ups are incredibly useful.
I am a big fan of making a test version before committing to the full quantity.
Usually, I get a few of the elements I expect to use and make one small test arrangement. It doesn’t need to be finished or perfect. Sometimes it is enough just to hold the branches, grasses or flowers together and look at their size and colour combination.
That immediately gives you a much better idea of what one arrangement actually needs.
For example, if one arrangement needs three bunches of grasses, five branches, two flowers and a few additional elements, you can multiply those quantities by the number of arrangements you need and add a little extra for good measure.
The same principle works for other elements too.
If you have no idea how large the plant pots or lanterns should be, you can even cut a rough shape out of cardboard or use a bucket as a stand-in for a pot.
It may sound a little silly, but it is much easier to discover that your proportions are wrong before you buy twenty large pots.
And one more little tip, especially for outdoor decorating:
GO BIGGER!
Things almost always look smaller outdoors than you imagine they will.
From inspiration to a shopping list
Once the concept and proportions started to become clear, I made a list of everything I would probably need.
Plants to buy.
Materials to collect.
Flower pots.
Lanterns.
Lights.
Pumpkins.
Straw bales.
Baskets.
Fixings and anything else needed for installation.
From there, I could make a proper sourcing plan.
What could I buy, and where?
What could I collect from the fields or woods?
What did I already have?
This also made it much easier to plan the order of the work.
Before I could start decorating, there was a little research to do: where could I find the right natural materials, which shops had the colors and plants I needed, what was available at a reasonable price, and what could I make use of from things I already had?
Preparing the natural materials
Because I knew I wanted to use dried materials collected from the fields, I could start gathering those well in advance and keep them protected from rain.
I also knew I wanted to use dried hydrangea flowers, so I needed to allow time for them to dry properly.
I wanted the hydrangeas to turn brown rather than preserve their original colour. So I picked them, put them directly into a bucket without water and left them somewhere protected from rain but exposed to sunlight.
The sunlight helped them dry quickly and turn brown.
It took around five to seven days for them to become dry enough to use confidently in the arrangements.
Some of the branches I collected were treated differently. I wanted them to keep their leaves attached rather than dropping them immediately, so I put them in a small amount of water and allowed them to dry that way.
This is another thing worth finding out before collecting natural materials: not all branches dry in the same way.
Some hold onto their leaves when dried at the right stage, while others immediately drop their leaves or dry into a crumpled mess.
Oak, for example, is useful because its leaves can remain attached and turn a beautiful brown colour as they dry.
Figuring out how everything would actually work
At this point, I also had to think about installation.
I knew that I wanted large, full arrangements, and simply planting a few flowers wasn’t going to achieve that look.
So I needed to build actual arrangements, which meant finding a way to secure dried branches and grasses while also giving the living plants enough soil and water.
I decided to use hanging baskets with a large chrysanthemum ball as the base. The living plant would provide the soil, and I could push the dried branches, grasses and other decorative elements directly into it.
Once the first basket was finished, I knew the idea worked.
That first arrangement became my template for everything else, including the window boxes.
The moist soil turned out to be a very useful place to insert all sorts of additional elements.
The first basket also gave me a much better idea of how long one arrangement would take to make. I could then use that information to estimate the time needed for the rest.
And this is one of the most useful things about making a first test piece: it removes a lot of uncertainty.
At the beginning, I wasn’t completely sure whether I would actually achieve the effect I had imagined.
Once the first arrangement was finished, I knew I could.
From there, the job was mainly to repeat the formula.
Making the arrangements at home
This time, I decided to make the larger arrangements at home and transport them to the café ready to install.
It saved a surprising amount of time and energy.
There is another reason I prefer working this way: I don’t particularly enjoy creating a half-finished piece of work in public.
The creative process can take a while, and I don’t always know exactly what I am doing until I start putting things together.
Having people walk past and see something unfinished somehow creates a kind of pressure that I don’t need.
So I made the arrangements at home, packed everything up and brought it to the café ready for installation.
Eight hours later…
On installation day, I arrived with the finished arrangements, straw bales, flowers, pumpkins and everything else needed for the final result.
Even though most of the planning had already been done and many of the arrangements were finished, the installation still took eight hours.
The old flowers had to be removed, everything had to be carried into place, the arrangements had to be secured and adjusted, and then, of course, everything had to be cleaned up afterwards.
So, if you are planning a large decorating project, leave yourself enough time.
Even when everything is carefully planned, all the little jobs add up.
Making it weatherproof and childproof
There was one more important part of the installation: making sure everything stayed where it was supposed to stay.
Outdoor decorations have to deal with wind, rain and changing weather. And in this particular location, there are also plenty of curious little hands around.
So every movable element had to be secured properly.
I even pushed long wooden barbecue skewers through the pumpkins and into the straw bales so that they couldn’t simply roll away.
I also made sure that all the plant pots, hanging baskets and window boxes were properly secured and able to withstand the weather.
Finally, I added a few Christmas lights.
Not enough to make the display feel like Christmas yet, but just enough that the autumn decorations would still be visible on dark evenings.
And that was it.
What started as an AI-generated idea eventually became a real-life autumn entrance, built from a combination of bought plants, collected natural materials, dried flowers, pumpkins and a lot of planning.
The biggest lesson is that the finished result doesn’t actually start with the decorating.
It starts much earlier, with figuring out the visual idea, testing the proportions, breaking the idea into manageable pieces and making sure you know how everything will work in real life.
That is what makes a big decorative project feel much less overwhelming.
And sometimes, all you really need is one good first arrangement to prove that the idea can work.
