Most events that take on a garden theme use tons of flowers and foliage. But at a recent gala dinner and auction for the Georgiana Bruce Kirby Preparatory School in Santa Cruz, California, Peggy Young & Associates eschewed live plants and chose a different way to express the theme. In the dining room, galvanized watering cans hung over tables, with fiber optic lights mimicking water pouring out of the spouts.
At the Historic House Trust of New York City's Founders Award gala, 360 Design Events matched the decor to the theme by hanging hats in and around the tent set up at Gracie Mansion. The June 5 dinner's theme was "hats off," so the design firm used colorful ribbons to suspend dozens of straw hats from trees in the garden and the tent ceiling. And to prevent waste, guests were invited to take home the headwear as a memento of the evening.
The planetarium, shaped like a character from an Adult Swim show, offered screenings of the channel's content as well as celestial graphics. Adult Swim also sponsored fireworks after headliner Jack Johnson's performance.
The Boathouse restaurant, a new steak house in Downtown Disney, offers diners an unusual waterfront excursion. Guests are invited to take 20-minute boat tours of the waterfront section of the Walt Disney World Resort, and they ride in an amphibious vehicle known as the amphicar.Â
Flowers from Shawna Yamamoto decorated tabletop centerpieces that marked the conference's 35th anniversary.
Here's another Pop Art-inspired idea: Inspired by Jeff Koons's "Puppy" sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, event producer Van Wyck & Van Wyck built a four-foot-tall topiary shaped in the form of a griffin at the 2012 event in New York. The mythical animal is sponsor JW Marriott's logo, and the floral version, which was created as a surprise for the brand executives, had eyes made of mums.
