Continuing with the subject of Anthropologie from the last ‘Plants in Shops’ post, I wanted this time to focus on their Edinburgh store, situated on the beautiful George Street. I always make a bee line for Anthro’ whenever I’m visiting Edinburgh because its SO MUCH QUIETER than the London stores! You can really spend a lot of time looking around as the scale and layout of the store is great, and as expected, their plant portfolio is impeccable. I talked more about an introduction to Anthropologie and brand identity in the last post, so here I’m going to jump right into the photographs.
Anthropologie store design really utilises the ‘eclectic cool aesthetic’ that seems incredibly current and visually appealing in my opinion. With an increase in plant popularity, this type of store ‘dressing’ draws on this as it mimics the way people place plants around their home. I will say here that I dislike the idea of plants being a fad or ‘on trend’, but hope that it instead encourages more and more people develop a sustained interest and appreciation of plants in their homes. I’m going to dedicate a whole post to this topic at a later date, having read a number of interesting Instagram comments and also a Guardian article that discusses some of these points… I digress.
The store is of large proportions which evokes a sense of grandeur, and means that the shop interior has quite a bit of room to ‘breathe’ (especially to those who are used to shopping in their London stores). George Street itself is also incredibly wide …it’s one of my favourite streets in Edinburgh! Luckily, this scale also means that there is a relatively large proportion of space dedicated to plant displays. The photograph below shows a clean white plant pot on a tall artists stool (covered in paint drips), which is situated on a nook on the staircase, a simple yet striking and memorable display. Seeing things like this make me think about ways I can display plants in my own home, and I love the idea of finding something like this to display a string of pearls, or a string of hearts perhaps (both ranking very high on my plant wish list).
The photograph above left shows the kind of thing I was alluding to above – this display is set up downstairs, on a sort of ‘stage’ at the very front of the store where light floods down from the first floor shop front windows …creating a cheery, colourful ensemble, with great impact.
One of my favourite aspects of Anthro’s plant displays is when they use their plants to showcase their own pots [photographs above and below], and vice versa! The Edinburgh store did this a lot and it really allowed the plants to seamlessly sit amongst the plant pot collections without looking too staged. There is a great plant pot section downstairs and I’m pretty sure I would have come away with more than one if I wasn’t travelling by train! As a side note, I have 4 or 5 of their pots at the moment and they are of brilliant quality and style, they are extremely hard wearing and I love them all!
…JUST LOOK AT THEIR SPIDER PLANT SELECTION! Also …look at the hanging display below – it looks completely mad, but in a good way! I’d love to see this full and in someones home …I think I’m going to have a look on Instagram to see if I can find it.
One of my more geeky observations was how pleased I was to see the less common (where I’m from anyway) cultivar of spider plant – [above] – the ‘variegatum‘, which has white margins with a darker green central stripe. It is generally smaller than the other variety, which I have (the ‘vittatum‘), but as the photograph above shows, it’s easily of a comparable size to the more commonly available variety [below]!
Looking at the photographs whilst putting together this post has made me want to find one of these ‘variegatum‘ spider plants – I love the subtle difference of a white edge to the darker green leaves …and another difference is that the long stems that hold the plantlets are green and not white.
So aside from going into this store to actually shop, if you are near the area, do pop in and enjoy the verdurous offerings at Anthro’ Edinburgh. But if you are nowhere near there…I hope this post has offered some interior design inspiration.
*This post is not sponsored!
Thanks for reading!
HOUSEPLANTHOUSE 