Style a garden on your table this festive season

BH: With so many elements in the mix, how do you manage the whole tablescape visually?

RK: It is not very difficult. I don't like to have a very tall arrangement in the middle, because you can't see the person on the other side. I prefer to have things that are scattered around. I like to have a beautiful cheese platter on the table with a few candles, flowers, and shrubbery. Sometimes, I even use a whole tropical vibe of putting a banana leaf on the table. I will add a striped tablecloth, put lots of local fruit, avocado, dates, black water chestnut, all these things add a little bit of color to your table. Your food also adds the color, be it continental, Asian, Indian, there's always colour in food that adds to your tablescape visually.

BH: How do we replicate it in our homes?

RK: All you need is cast iron or wrought iron skeleton of a light. It can be any shape—a star, a round light, or even a lantern. The main thing is to have a skeleton and you put a beautiful light inside it. Now, for when we start filling the chandelier, you need to collect a lot of foliage that is around you. You can collect different kinds of leaves on a branch. We cut out stalks of this Moringa or Fig tree to start filling the skeleton. Then we found these really pretty baby pink flowers that were growing around here and we cut them and started hanging them. I picked up a whole bunch of baby’s breath in the market. Baby’s breath is one of the prettiest flowers you can have. It just fills up any space, any vase, any chandelier. Since we were doing this for Beautiful Homes today, we also brought some Heliconia from the market. The trick of a chandelier is to basically see that it really fills a large part of your table on top. And it looks beautiful when you're sitting at the table and you look at this from below.

All images by Anubhav Deka