Designing Life’s Celebrations: DeJuan Stroud

DeJuan Stroud’s book, “Designing Life’s Celebrations” is really a fresh guide to entertaining with an emphasis on do it yourself tabletop floral design. Flipping through the pages alone is enough inspire readers to create beauty on their own, but I love that DeJuan also provides a rich narrative of his childhood and background on his inspiration for each design and event photographed in the book.

As a celebrity event designer, Stroud gained interest in floral design by helping his grandmother in her garden. His designs are effortless and striking while remaining rooted in tradition.

DeJuan adds fresh simple green and white bouquets to liven up this collection of traditional silver vases!

Throughout the book, DeJuan demystifies the art of tabletop decor. He emphasizes the ease of a simple DIY floral arrangement and the joy it can provide when celebrating life’s day-to-day occasions.

Stroud provides basic flower care tips and suggested tabletop layouts for large party arrangements. He stresses variety in height, flower type, and container.

DeJuan also gives great entertaining tips to readers in the workbook section. I love reading about the idea of what he calls “breakaway bouquets” as a group of small bundled bouquets clustered together to create a single arrangement. At the end of your celebration Stroud suggests giving guests each one of the small arrangements as a beautiful party favor to remember their evening by, I love that!

I fully enjoyed and highly recommend you read “Designing Life’s Celebrations,” as it is a great resource on how to continue to find and create beauty every day and the importance of that realization. DeJuan writes, “When you bring beauty, care and attention to the occasion, you mark the moment- for a lifetime.” This is such a great quote to end the book with, it resonates with me and the field of interior design on a variety of levels.