Decor

The dance floor is an obvious place to make an impact. For a private event, designer Preston Bailey created a unique dance floor that served as the evening's focal point. Hundreds of flowers were covered in Plexiglas, creating a massive floral carpet. "The result was a statement piece that allowed guests to dance on air," said Bailey. 

The floor can also be an unexpected place for logos, sponsor information, or branding. The TEDActive conference in 2013 took over some of the host venue's Spanish tiles for its own messaging. The special tiles at La Quinta resort in the Palm Springs area also guided attendees along the walkways to the various event venues on the sprawling property.

Floor decor can serve a bigger purpose. During Chicago’s Pitchfork Music Festival in 2015, carpet company Flor handed out some 5,000 squares of carpet so that guests could make their own carpeted seating areas on the grass—creating a functional and eye-catching decor idea. When the weather turned stormy during the festival, attendees used the carpets to cover muddy spots on the grounds.

Energy Floors offers human-powered, interactive dance floors for event rentals worldwide. The eight-inch-deep tiles each house small generators; the tiles compress when stepped on, activating the generators to convert the kinetic energy produced by the dancers into electricity. The power can be used to activate the colorful LED light tubes inside the tiles that respond to the movement of dancers or nearby electrical systems.

Expanding wall and ceiling decor down to the floor can also have a big impact. At the Museum of Contemporary Art's 2015 Benefit Art Auction in Chicago, colorful stripe-on-stripe decor expanded all the way to the floor, creating an optical illusion. Ghost chairs and striped tables allowed the design to feel fully immersive.

Sometimes all you need is some masking tape. During Austin's 2014 South by Southwest, event production agency MKG brightened up a dark room using neon masking tape and ultraviolet lighting, creating an edgy, Pop Art-inspired look for the party for online magazine xoJane.com.

The Brussels Flower Carpet is a 19,375-square-foot mosaic of 700,000 intricately arranged begonias that comes to life every two years for five days during August in the central square of the European capital city. Meant to incite conversation about nature, cities, and art, the designs have typically incorporated themes from Belgium’s history since the first carpet was created in 1971. It takes 100 gardeners four hours to arrange the petals by hand.

S’mores got their start as sticky, gooey, handheld campfire treats, but events have reinvented them in many ways friendlier to guests, such as this example of a lollipop version at the Engage!14 Wedding Summit dessert party.

At the Watermill Center’s benefit in 2015, Great Performances created dishes that would allow guests to easily roam—all self-serve options designed to be hand-held and didn't even necessarily require plates. Among them was fried chicken served in waffle cones.

At a September event, Preston Bailey transformed the new Four Seasons New York Downtown in celebration of his relationship with the property. As part of the event’s catering options, the hotel supplied tiramisu served as grab-and-go offerings.

Rather than the traditional bowl of splash-prone red sauce, New York’s Elegant Affairs offered a neater take on spaghetti and meatballs, using mess-free form topped with a micro meatball and marinara and sprinkled with parmesan.

Mary Giuliani Catering and Events in New York created a catering option of one-bite paella with shrimp and chorizo with sips of sangria, a take on the hearty rice dish.

Salad can be messy, with the risk of oily dressing ending up on clothes and hands. Occasions Caterers in Washington created a wedge salad bite hors d’oeuvre, served on a fork, that tidies up salad service.

Always a crowd favorite, hummus can get messy when served as a dip. At the 2014 Washington Humane Society's annual Fashion for Paws runway show, hors d'oeuvres during the reception included beets and hummus on pita points as a tidy alternative to service at a station.

A popular alternative to soup in a bowl, with all of its messy slurp potential, many caterers offer inventive soup shooters. One example: Chicago’s Boutique Bites' artful soup shooters with popcorn and truffle oil.