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"Flowers are like nature's architecture," says Mako Otaki, a 32-year-old architect and designer, better known to her clients as Mako the Flower Girl. A graduate of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Mako now makes her living designing, vivid yet playful, floral arrangements for events, offices, and residences. Together with her partner Serafin O. Boitel, they have founded a rather successful floral and furniture design studio based in Los Angeles and often collaborate with other architects on larger projects and installations. One might even call Mako a floral architect.
Certainly, there is an architectural element to many of her designs in the way simple flowers are coiled, trimmed, and transformed into elegant figures and silhouettes. "It's like architecture on a smaller scale," says Mako, "although because there is not so much money involved, I have the freedom to be inventive and spontaneous."
Mako's interest in floral design began as a young child, helping her mother prepare flower arrangements for the tea ceremony—an ancient ritual in Japan known as Ikebana. Growing up, she continued to enjoy it as a pastime, making gifts for friends and family. It was not until after her graduation from SCI-Arc when her mother was hospitalized for diabetes that she began to think of it as a career. "I started arranging flowers for my mother on the floor of her hospital room, sometimes several times a day, to entertain her during her long hospital stay," Mako says. "Soon, I found myself making frequent trips at two in morning to Home Depot and the flower market downtown for construction supplies." Sure enough architects in the area began to take notice of her designs, and it was not long before she was invited to collaborate on several projects. "And that's how it began," she says. "It's not like I set out saying 'I'm going to find this whole new medium in flower design.' It's fun and cheap, and it just sort of evolved into a practice."
Currently, Mako and her partner are collaborating with Todd Erlandson at (M)Arch, a L.A. Firm, on designing furniture and floral installations for a reception space for HBO Studios and in the past have worked with architects, Pugh+Scarpa, Kenli Interior Design, and Sasha Tarnopolsky of DayDesign. Her designs have also been featured in a number of events, including the weddings of some fairly well known designers like Eric Moss. When asked how she typically approaches a design, she replied with a laugh, "I try to follow themes, patterns, and color combinations, have a little fun and leave the rest to the imagination!"
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