L'Olivier: The Frenchman Who Brought Provence to Park Avenue

Some florists learn the trade in a shop. Olivier Giugni learned it on his grandparents' land.

He grew up in Brignoles, a small village in Provence tucked between Saint-Tropez and Aix-en-Provence, on a family property that included a winery and olive groves. He briefly considered architecture, then fashion design, before deciding neither one made sense — flowers were the thing he'd been doing his whole life without calling it a career. Self-taught, no formal design school, just years spent close to the land his family worked.

From Cardin's Paris Shop to a Brownstone on 76th Street

At twenty, Giugni met Pierre Cardin — yes, that Cardin — and spent six years as design director of Les Fleurs de Maxim's, Cardin's floral operation in Paris. In 1986, Cardin sent him to New York for what was supposed to be a ten-day trip: open a small flower shop, get it running, go home. Giugni never left.

He spent nine years building his eye and his client base before going out on his own, opening L'Olivier Floral Atelier in 1994 in a landmark brownstone at 19 East 76th Street — next door to The Carlyle Hotel, across the street from Café Boulud. The location told you everything about the clientele before you ever saw the flowers.

The Leaf-Wrapped Vase and a Very French Idea of Modern

Giugni built his reputation on a signature move: wrapping the outside of a plain glass vase in overlapping leaves, turning the container itself into part of the arrangement rather than something to hide behind flowers. It became his calling card, copied widely, credited to him originally. His broader style leaned sculptural and clean — modern, graphic, unmistakably his, but with a warmth he traced straight back to Provence. He's described his own work as sensual, sexy, full of the color and light of the south of France, translated into a New York register.

That style found its way into some of the most recognizable rooms in the city — the lobbies of The Plaza, The Carlyle, and the Loews Regency, the dining room at Daniel, a full-scale reimagining of Rockefeller Center's Rainbow Room as a 1930s Manhattan nightclub. His client list, kept characteristically discreet, has included Michelle Obama. As the business grew, he added a second studio in Harlem — a space with its own unlikely history, having once been a private stable that housed horses belonging to Brooke Astor.

A New Chapter

In 2019, on the eve of L'Olivier's 25th anniversary, Boston's Winston Flowers — a family-owned luxury florist with its own long history, dating back to a floral pushcart in 1944 — acquired L'Olivier. Giugni stayed on as Senior Design Consultant, and Carine Bonnet, L'Olivier's longtime general manager, took over running Winston Flowers' New York design studio in Long Island City. The L'Olivier name and design language live on inside Winston Flowers' New York operation today — a Provençal sensibility that's now been folded into a bigger, multi-generational American floral house, rather than standing entirely on its own.

It's a very New York kind of ending for a very French story: the corner shop becomes part of something larger, but the fingerprints — leaf-wrapped vases, sculptural color, a self-taught eye trained on his grandparents' olive groves — don't disappear. They just get a bigger stage.

Why We Love It

L'Olivier has consistently turned out some of the most striking floral work in New York — Giugni's monumental arrangements show up in hotel lobbies and restaurant dining rooms across the city, but the studio scales down just as well for a single arrangement in someone's home. It's also a reliable name to know if you're planning a wedding or a party of your own. Goop has featured the studio in both its New York City party planning guide and its roundup of the world's most skilled florists.

And yes, it's worth saying: Giugni himself is as photogenic as his arrangements. You can see both on his personal Instagram, @oliviergiugni.

We're always drawn to stories like Giugni's — proof that the most distinctive design work usually starts somewhere very specific, and very far from where it ends up.