When the style set’s go-to florist Whitney Hawkings and her fashion designer husband Peter were ambitious young twenty-somethings, they used to stroll through London’s Chelsea and look wistfully at a beautiful Georgian townhouse, daydreaming that they would one day live in one just like it.
More than 20 years later, the couple have fulfilled that dream. But rather than finding a home similar to the one they admired so much, they are now the proud owners of the very same six-storey property, which overlooks the River Thames and Battersea Bridge.
"We walked past it so many times when we were young and just married, saying: 'Oh my god. What would it be like to live in that house?'" Whitney tells HELLO! in this exclusive interview. "When Peter and I sat down a couple of years ago to figure out what our dream house would look like, he said: 'Do you remember that house we saw years and years ago?' And then I found that it was for sale. Now, I wake up every morning and think: 'How did I get here?' I can’t believe how lucky we are."
© Simon UptonThere’s a lot more than luck behind the couple’s story, however. Ten years ago, Whitney launched her luxury flower brand Flowerbx, which has now blossomed into a multi-million pound global business which supplies top quality blooms to A-list celebrities, five-star hotels, restaurants and fashion brands around the world.
Customers include David and Victoria Beckham, Julianne Moore, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Jimmy Choo, The River Cafe and Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants in London, as well as New York’s The Mark, Ritz-Carlton and Park Hyatt hotels. The Chancery Rosewood and the Corinthia in London both have Whitney’s flower shops on site.
At the recent London premiere of Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch’s film The Roses, the Flowerbx team spent hours creating a wall of red roses, pinned to chicken wire, as the stunning backdrop to the red carpet. For the Chelsea in Bloom festival, they transformed the facade of Mayfair private members club Annabel’s with thousands of seasonal flowers.
Having found a gap in the flower delivery market for simple, high-quality single-stem bouquets without fillers, Texan-born Whitney – who spent two decades at the side of the designer Tom Ford, first as his PA at Gucci and later as his communications director – decided to create the service herself.
Rather than creating arrangements from flowers that have been sitting around for days, Whitney’s A-grade blooms – at the peak of freshness and with longer stems and larger heads – are cut to order and delivered to customers the next day, cutting out the middleman and avoiding waste.
© Simon Upton"We order from the growers in Holland, they’re put on a lorry overnight, we recondition them, repackage them, quality check them and send them to you tomorrow, so, literally, they can't be fresher," she explains. "They last four, five, or six days longer than if you bought them somewhere else, so you’re not paying for waste. Even though we offer a premium product, we’re competitive on price, and sustainability is key."
With her contacts in the fashion industry, Whitney soon branched out into corporate locations and events and the company has recently expanded into the lucrative Middle East market. Meanwhile, the Beckhams asked Whitney and her team to provide the arrangements for Victoria’s 50th birthday party last year and all three of this year’s celebrations for David’s milestone, which took place in Miami, London and the Cotswolds.
"Victoria has such beautiful taste in flowers," says Whitney. "She knows and respects flowers and appreciates the value they add, and her vision is aligned with what I find beautiful too. She also respects the seasons, so for her birthday, we had the most luscious peonies everywhere, while David’s was later in the year. The Miami party looked chic, beautiful Miami, with lots of white.
"Seasonal is key for me and I think tonal is the most beautiful way to consume flowers," she continues. "I'm a bit of a purist and my aesthetic philosophy is less is more. I don't think you can go wrong with single stem bunches, like 20 peonies or 20 pale pink roses and it’s impossible not to like ten hydrangeas in a vase."
© Simon UptonNaturally, the Hawkings’s home, which they share with their children Barron, 17, Snowdon, 15, and Wallis, nine, is always filled with fresh, seasonal flowers, displayed in vases in the panelled entrance hall, living room and kitchen.
Meanwhile Peter, who stepped down as creative director at Tom Ford last year, has thrown his artistic talents behind both the house renovations and his wife’s business.
The couple met in the early 2000s when they were both working at Gucci in London, and at first kept their office romance secret.
"We snuck around for eight or nine months and then we fell madly in love and never spent one more second apart," Whitney says. "Pete isn’t in the business, but he’s my life partner and my design guru, so every day I’m like: 'What do you think about this?'"
The couple hired the interior designer Veere Grenney to collaborate on their vision for the six-bedroom, 18th-century property, with its high ceilings, huge sash windows and marble fireplaces. Modern, oversize sofas designed by Veere sit side by side with antique chandeliers and pieces including a George III neoclassical giltwood armchair, Ralph Lauren end table and a Chinese lacquered screen.
© Simon Upton"The scale of the rooms needed a different scale of furniture, so it's a mix of antiques and furniture that Veere had made for the space," explains Whitney. "For as long as I’ve known him, Pete has been tearing sheets of his dream house and his dream rooms and Veere featured very heavily in all of his inspiration."
Now that Whitney and Peter are finally living their dream, you might expect them to sit back on their plush sofas, inhale the scent of freshly cut flowers and put their feet up. But there is still plenty left to achieve.
"I haven’t even gotten close to fulfilling our potential," says Whitney. "Once we've proven that we can make the Middle East as profitable and successful as we believe it can be, we can move into Singapore and India and deeper into the US market. This is where the fun begins, and I’m just getting started."
For more, visit flowerbx.com
For the full interview pick up a copy of this week’s Luxe issue, on sale now
