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Homes

Front Porch: From faux florals, real success

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published April 8, 2005

Robyn Story's showroom in North Tampa is like the world's most glamorous and efficiently organized jungle.

It smells like good stuff, too: rain, vanilla, flower petals.

Thousands of flowers hang upside down, variegated by color and specimen, row after row of gladiolas, sunflowers, roses and magnolia blossoms that look like they've just been plucked and carried in by the armload.

"Look how real this looks," Story exclaimed one afternoon last week, pinching a faux camellia leaf that looked like the real deal. "Everything has got to look natural and real - like it's growing toward the sun - or it doesn't make it in here."

Story, a former top New York advertising executive, who favors pink Swarovski crystal reading glasses and hip black tank dresses embellished with her corporate logo, retired six years ago and didn't like being idle.

So, she started a flower business, Robyn Story Designs, out of her garage in Avila.

An avid gardener with a penchant for English-style plantings - delphiniums and foxgloves - Story, 47, turned her attention toward silk flowers because she was impressed with the quality of imports from China and Taiwan.

Her natural affinity for arranging them into painterly bouquets that resembled still-lifes began attracting the attention of neighbors and, eventually, businesses. Three years ago, her company burgeoned so quickly that she began renting warehouse space in a small industrial park at 9249 Lazy Lane, off Dale Mabry Highway near Busch Boulevard in North Tampa.

"My husband really wanted his garage back - he couldn't get his cars out - and the neighbors weren't happy," she recalls. "It really got out of control."

To accommodate a growing list of corporate clients - from home builders to hotel chains clamoring for her faux floral creations - Story rented 500 square feet of commercial space, just enough room to squeeze in a studio and some storage.

She brought in top floral designers, including Earl Garland, who for years owned Garland's Garden Shop in South Tampa, where she once went to buy hard-to-get perennials for her English garden.

Her client roster has blossomed to include luxury car dealers, diamond merchants and developers. She and her team arrange flowers for large companies that sell them under their own labels. Good silk flowers, she explains, when arranged beautifully, "feel homey and good" and give a room a permanent lift of color like nothing else.

She has since expanded to 7,000 square feet of warehouse and showroom space, which she recently opened to the public. The cute black awnings go up next week; a real garden goes in soon out back, and faux painted vines will cover one side of the building. Her retail store will also feature a showroom stocked with garden accessories as well as fine art - a plucky mix of prints and originals. ("I'm a really good shopper, so it will be completely different than what you see at Stein Mart," she says.)

In short, what was once the exclusive domain of florists and interior designers is now the hunting ground for regular shoppers. In addition to flowers, she's offering an array of home goods, from gigantic urns to scented candles to monogrammed toilet paper.

"We're just evolving - nothing fancy - we're just quaint," she says. "We are what we are."

The idea, she says, was to bring the boutique-y, South Tampa kind of home store to shoppers in the north end of town.

"Plus, I didn't want to pay $40 a square foot for real estate," she quips.

[Last modified April 7, 2005, 08:54:03]