how to make a botanical privacy screen
Biophilic Wall Design
Special guest: Kendra LaRoche @loftandleaf
bringing the outdoors in: designing a breathtaking indoor botanical privacy screen
There are endless ways to incorporate outdoor nature in your indoor spaces. One of the most dramatic and breathtaking forms of this is a biophilic wall design. Today we chat with Kendra LaRoche from Loft & Leaf to learn about her inspiration behind her Veradek botanical Privacy Screen.
Can you tell us about yourself and your design background?My name is Kendra LaRoche. I started working with plants three years ago after growing my own house plant collection. After collecting over 100 houseplants, my knowledge of them grew and so did my love!
I took a chance on my new found passion and applied to a local nursery to work with plants. They hired me and took me under their wing. I learned the basics about landscaping and container gardening here and from there went on to take a position as the lead container designer at a design firm in south Florida! This is where I really fell in love with container gardening. I learned everything I know from leading the teams there and being taught by some great mentors.
How did you get interested in doing biophilic design?
After a year of being mentored, I knew I wanted to take a more creative route with my designs than the firm allowed. I set off to start my own business and that's how Loft & Leaf was born. The biggest inspiration for Loft & Leaf comes from our natural environment and our surroundings. My mission is to bring the outside in!
Tell us about your design process for this piece—what was your inspiration? Your method? The plants you used and why?
Creating the Veradek Privacy Screen really allowed a great opportunity to bring the outside in! While planning my design for the privacy screen I knew it needed to be aesthetically pleasing, attainable, and practical for consumers. This led me to use preserved moss, a beautiful product that needs no care but still brings the look to life all while playing off the design of the screen.
How would you recommend someone go about creating their own biophilic or living wall in their own home? What are the need to knows and need to dos?To recreate a piece like this in your home I recommend using orchids and air plants to hang from the screen. As well as incorporating the preserved moss to give it that lived-in look! Consider adding one (or more) Veradek planters to the design to add some dimension! Another approach I considered was planting the base container with vining plants and having them grow up the screen. The vining plants would grow nicely up the screen!
2 Comments
sorry about my last post, the message was supposed to be to customer service, not the whole world! I will send it to the right person now that I realized my mistake. Can you please remove that comment for me?
Hi there! I bought your Flowleaf divider off Amazon last year for cacti/houseplant window that is south facing. I installed it inside of the window and it fits perfectly just like it was custom-made. I have it laying horizontal across the bottom of the window so that the top of the window isn’t covered, and I can still see out the window. I was thrilled at the beauty of it, and how it protects my plants from getting roasted through the glass. I put it up in the early fall, so I’m only just realizing now how hot the metal gets and already my aloes got burned a little bit from sitting close to it and it’s not even summer yet. My question is, is there any way you do a custom order so that it could be painted white? It’s not a project I really want to take on, and if I could get a white one I can still use the black one in the north facing window just because it would look pretty. If not, could you please suggest a type of paint that I can use to paint my black one white? I absolutely love your products, I’ve never seen anything like them in my entire life. These panels have so many uses. I look forward to any help that you can offer to me. I live in a very humble small home, and that screen in my window is such a focal piece that I’ve had many of the people who deliver packages here ask where I got it and of course I tell them. Everyone thought I had a custom-made for my window because it fits in there perfectly. Thank you so very much and I look forward to hearing back from you at your convenience. Have a wonderful day! Shonna :)