Dubai Masterclass — 4–6 May 2024

4–6 May 2024 — Dubai, UAE — our home city in the Gulf — the studio, the academy and the toughest flower climate we teach in.

For three days last May, the home studio in Dubai turned itself over to spring. It is not a soft room — bare concrete walls rise on every side, a chandelier of glass drops hangs incongruously from the raw ceiling, and white folding tables sit on a poured floor still marked from the work it usually does. Against that grey backdrop the flowers arrived like an argument for colour, and the class of the first weekend of May settled in with tote bags and coffee to make the case.

Much of the teaching happened at the front, where colour theory was worked out in real time — a marker squeaking across a flip chart, a rough sketch of a bouquet with a box beneath it labelled thirty per cent, a projected colour wheel glowing on the wall behind. Pricing came the same plain way, a slide asking what is inside that price, and the room leaned in to listen. Then everyone went to their benches and simply built.

The palette split cleanly in two. There were the bold ones — hot pink and crimson roses, blue delphinium and hydrangea, purple lisianthus and slim stems of nerine, gathered loose and vivid. And there were the quiet ones — creams and peaches and soft whites, garden roses and peonies and clematis dropped into pale hatboxes, the sort of thing you carry pressed against you out into the light. Along one wall the students raised a tall installation: blush and white roses, gypsophila by the armful, outsized paper blooms and orchids climbing gilt frames against the concrete.

By the close each person had something of their own to hold up to the camera — a green-handed florist burying her nose in eucalyptus, another trimming stems in an academy apron — and the tough Gulf light outside, for once, was kind to what they had made.

The location

Dubai, United Arab Emirates — the Lacy Bird studio and academy.

The three days

Every touring edition runs the same Lacy Bird programme, rebuilt around the local market's flowers:

• Day one — colour theory and the house palette, the composition system, the boxed arrangement and the round commercial bouquet.
• Day two — the spreading bouquet, wrapping and presentation, and a professional photoshoot of every participant's finished work.
• Day three — large-scale event decor and installation, the business of floristry, and certificates.

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