pinon_flowers_3When Jun Pinon arrived in San Francisco from the Philippines in 1980 at age 16, he had nothing except a dream: to be a floral designer. Working out of the back of his truck, he went door to door looking for work and clients. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel snapped him up as their in-house florist and launched him on the road to where he is today – one of San Francisco’s premier talents creating his sleek, edgy, and attention-grabbing arrangements for clients like Vanessa Getty, Oprah Winfrey, Sharon Stone, and other upscale establishments like San Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel and Campton Place Hotel.

Pinon’s floral designs combine a breathtaking vibrancy of color coupled with an unobtrusive and modern sensibility, and incorporate earth-friendly, biodegradable items like kumquats, limes and purple artichokes. Green bell peppers are teamed with red coxcomb and tall, red amaryllis; red bell peppers are arranged with lavender hyacinths and orange tulips. Pinon calls it “hot stuff for a cooler planet.”

Using a lot of popular flowers like anthuria, orchids and roses, he emphasizes simplicity in his designs, preferring not to mix too many different flowers or colors in any one arrangement. A vase of densely bunched, vivid orange and yellow tulips of uniform height, for instance, are paired only with a couple of deep violet, low-lying hydrangeas and a smattering of slender orchid blooms.

“My style is clean and crisp,” Pinon says. “I don’t design to impress. I design to inspire.”

Pinon recommends using clusters of the same flowers for maximum effect. “Sunflowers are beautiful on their own,” he says, “but if you have ten together they are ten times as beautiful and more powerful.”

Here are some of Pinon’s tips for your own floral arrangements:

1. If you are doing a mixture, you have to have the background or what we call the foundation flowers, the taller flowers, like hydrangeas. In front of those, you can use roses, and in front of those, use something smaller like freesias. That way the flowers are not all the same size. You have to have the superstar, the star and the supporting cast.

2. Always simplify your arrangements. Don’t make them complicated. Life is complicated as it is.

3. Buy your centerpieces for your tables a couple of days ahead of time to make sure you give your flowers time to hydrate and look their best. Do not buy flowers that are already open. If you do only have a short time before your dinner party, you can buy a more developed flower. If your party is a couple of days away, make sure the flowers you buy are tight, especially tulips. That’s because on a warm day tulips blow open.

4. Be inventive with your containers. You can even be green and use pre-existing items like soup tureens, martini glasses and pomelos as containers instead of Styrofoam.

Pinon leads floral classes at Bloomingdale’s and floral demonstrations at Macy’s West, Bloomingdale’s and Williams Sonoma Home. For more information and to get on the waiting list for classes click here.
[Photo from Creative Commons]