Behind the Blooms: How Crossed Keys Designs Brings Your Wedding Vision to Life

Every wedding begins with a vision. At Crossed Keys Estate, that vision is brought to life by Crossed Keys Designs, our exclusive in-house floral and design team. Working solely on-site, we execute over 90 weddings annually, so we know this space inside and out: from vine-draped beams to 40 feet of windows glowing with candlelight. If you’ve ever wondered what the floral and design process actually looks like, here’s everything you need to know.

Share Your Vision

The process starts with you gathering inspiration, whether it’s a full Pinterest board or a few screenshots. We’ll schedule an in-person meeting and send you a link to upload images of bouquets, ceremonies, and centerpieces you love. Don’t worry about having it all figured out. That’s what the meeting is for.

Your Floral Design Meeting

We’ll meet six months before the wedding. Our timing is intentional to give us room to refine the vision without letting too much time pass for inspiration to shift. During the meeting, we’ll discuss the color palette, floral style, and rental items, including farmhouse tables, lounge furniture, glassware, chargers, and flatware. We’ll also physically lay out different candle holders, vases, and dishes on a table so you can get a feel for spacing and fullness. We have thousands of photos from recent weddings held at the Estate and can show you what an arbor looks like beside the garden, the month of your wedding. Meetings are typically about 90 minutes, though every couple is different.

Our job is to translate your vision — you really only need to answer yes or no.

Receive a Custom Proposal

About three to four weeks after your meeting, you’ll receive a custom proposal outlining every floral and décor detail along with its cost. From there, you’ll have time to review, prioritize, and refine. Most couples go through one to two rounds of revisions before everything feels right.

 View a Sample Proposal

A note on priorities: There’s no single right answer. Some couples prefer to prioritize the ceremony, while others really want the reception to shine. Our honest take: Tall aisle markers create one of the biggest visual impacts, making the ceremony feel lush and full, and then they can be repurposed inside the reception, often in front of the band or DJ, at the sweetheart table, and at the bar.

 

If florals aren’t your biggest priority, colored or patterned rental linens can do a lot of heavy lifting. A bold linen or napkin really personalizes the reception experience in an elevated way.

 

If you’re on a budget and drawn to trending, high-end flowers — calla lilies, orchids, anthurium, hanging amaranthus — know that those specific varieties often can’t be substituted. Focusing on color rather than a specific flower type gives us a lot more flexibility to achieve the same visual impact at a lower cost.

Finalizing & Payment

Once revisions are complete, your proposal is refreshed and finalized. Payment is split into two installments — 50% upfront and the remaining 50% due 10 days before your wedding.

Flowers are ordered at least three weeks in advance (earlier for specialty or sourced blooms), so everything needs to be locked in before that point. We order from several wholesalers depending on the flowers needed. In the summer and fall, we source from a local flower co-op to access interesting, seasonal varieties and avoid international tariff fluctuations, since most of our flowers come from South America and Europe.

The Week of Your Wedding

In the days leading up to your wedding, our team is already prepping candles, processing and hydrating blooms, and building your floral pieces.

On Your Wedding Day

Personal deliveries come first. Bouquets, boutonnieres, flower girl petals, and any floral accessories are hand-delivered by our team, coordinated with your photographer’s arrival, so you have everything you need for flat lays.

 

Ceremony setup happens while you’re getting ready. If you’re outside, you may catch glimpses from the Playhouse windows. If the weather moves the ceremony inside, our team executes the same vision in the Farmhouse.

 

Reception setup runs through cocktail hour. Our team installs statement pieces, styles every table, repurposes ceremony florals, lights the candles, and handles every last detail before the grand reveal.

 

From our first meeting to the final installation, the team pours everything into your day. We’ve been working together for years, and that kind of familiarity makes a difference. We move fast and communicate well. Designing 90+ weddings a year in this space, we know what works, what photographs beautifully, and how to solve problems before you ever know they exist. When couples come to us with a vision and trust us to bring it to life, that’s when the magic really happens — and it’s the part we love most.

Hopefully, one day, we will get to bring your wedding vision to life, too. 🤍