Heathrow
in
Bloom
BRIEF
Celebrating a new season of fragrance, Heathrow Airport commissioned a new global fragrance report to highlight both purchasing trends of passengers travelling through Heathrow, and wider fragrance behaviours from across the world. To bring their findings to life, Heathrow Airport asked Larry Walshe Studios to create a giant map of the world, in flowers, to be publicly available to passengers travelling through Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 during September.
Chris Annetts, Heathrow’s Retail and Service Proposition Director said: ‘September is a really exciting month for us when it comes to fragrance. London Heathrow Airport is home to around 3,405 fragrances across 104 brands. We have both exclusives and new season fragrances including a new floral exclusive Tom Ford Vert Boheme, as well as a new season fresh CK One Gold. We wanted to celebrate our amazing collection by bringing the scents to life and help our passengers better understand the fragrance notes they enjoy the most. Larry’s floral artwork is a fantastic way for people to explore new fragrances as well as enjoying their favourites when they fly with us.”
Passengers travelling through Heathrow, the UK’s hub airport, were treated to a scent-sational new installation as the airport unveiled a giant floral map of the world. Created by florist Larry Walshe using over 2,000 fresh flower stems and studded with a textural tapestry of other curiosities, including raw amber stones and sandalwood, the impressive living artwork was housed in Terminal 5 to celebrate the new season of fragrance.
The installation offers unique insight into the four key fragrance notes of the new Autumn/Winter season: woody, fresh, oriental and floral, and fragrance preferences from around the globe. Each country in the map depicts the fresh scents that feature in the most beloved fragrances of different nations.
Designing a floral installation in an Airport is by no means an easy task; our scenic design team had to design within the security protocols required to ensure a safe yet impressive living artwork was created.
The map included roses, which hit the right note for floral-loving Brits and lavender and orange blossom, which tantalize the senses in the US and Mexico. Fresh scents including mint and mandarin featured as favourites in India, whilst spicier, oriental scents such as cinnamon and ginger are preferred by those in the UAE. Whilst each nation has a specific note it feels most scent-imental about, the most popular scents across the globe were revealed to be jasmine (28 per cent), lavender (27 per cent) rose (24 per cent), vanilla (20 per cent) and sandalwood (19 per cent).
As part of our floral design process, we created a watercolour to depict the wall of flowers which was later used as artwork for the reverse of this floral extravaganza; an area which showcased the most popular new season fragrances.
Bomb-resistant glass viewing areas were created by our scenic design team within the wall, each displaying new season fragrances from Tom Ford, CK, Gucci and Jo Malone to name a few.
To commemorate the exhibition at Heathrow, World Duty Free took the watercolour that we created and produced a limited edition gift wrap inspired by the installation for passengers who purchased any fragrance during the month of September.
Fred Creighton, Managing Director at World Duty Free said ‘Our exclusive gift wrap by celebrated British artist Larry Walshe is the perfect way to present a fragrance to someone special. Our dedicated fragrance team as always will be on hand to help customers navigate our carefully curated selection of scents to ensure customers find the perfect match for themselves or a loved one.’
To see our floral design and set design teams bringing the Heathrow in Bloom installation at Terminal 5 to life, we created a timelapse video…
