Joanna’s biography;
Joanna trained as a Florist in the Republic of Ireland in 2002 and after returning to the UK in 2004 worked freelance at first before eventually opening her own flower shop in a small village in Buckinghamshire. Her shop had a vintage country style to it and before long brides were not only coming to get their wedding flowers but also asking Joanna to style their whole wedding. With an ever growing collection of genuine period props this became so popular that in the end Joanna gave up the shop and became a wedding Florist/stylist and decorator. She also styled sets for other businesses including vintage glamping/caravans, tea parties, 1940’s hen parties and Vintage fashion shows. Joanna came to Malta and joined Villa Bologna as the Small Events Manager, Weddings Coordinator and Floral Designer in March of this year.
We are really excited with our new project to open our own Flower Shop here at Villa Bologna. There is a strong history between the Villa and flowers. Villa Bologna had the first Interflora shop in Malta and was a busy thriving floristry business. We decided to rummage through some of the archives to see if we could find any memorabilia associated with the original Villa Flower Shop. Delighted, we came across several old dusty diaries of the early years of the 1960s with beautifully kept records of orders and deliveries. We were amazed to see how many of these orders came from places such as South Africa, Australia and other far away places, all of course sent by cable and delivered all over Malta.
In our modern world today, many of the prospective brides that come to the Villa love the idea of having their wedding flowers come straight from the new Villa flower shop. Especially as when in season we love to incorporate many of the beautiful flowers and resources that the Villa Bologna gardens provide. Along side this we have many years experience in styling and decorating wedding venues and being resident at the Villa gives us the advantage of always being on site. So armed with our floral historic pride and bursting with new and innovative ideas for the new Flower Shop, the hard work commences!
The area to be converted into our shop has been used as “storage” space and as time has gone generally looks more abandoned. So we set to clearing it all and cleaning it all.
After a few days of sorting and clearing we have SPACE! now to start putting the necessities for any flower shop.
We want to use and recycle as much as possible from the Villa’s cellars where there is an abundance of old wood and broken bits. There are so many fantastic ways to upcycle old doors and units. Here are some of the doors we are going to use. Keep an eye out and see how they are transformed as part of the shops fittings!
We look forward to sharing with you more news and pictures on our progress next week.
