“Born With Flowers in My Head”: French Riviera Gardens, Villas and Cafés by Maxim Languev, Florist and Decorator in Nice

Maxim Languev is a florist, decorator and interior designer who has been working with flowers professionally since 1995 and with interiors since 2003. His first shop opened in St Petersburg in 1999 — six square meters — and grew into one of the city’s most recognizable floral studios, its window filled by a huge portrait of a blue cat named Rex. He has spent the last three years in Nice, on the French Riviera, running private, event and interior projects from Vienna to the Côte d’Azur while the St Petersburg shop carries on at home.

For Locals Insider, Max wrote about being born with flowers in his head, why he sets the rules before the client does, the accidental birth of the blue cat, cucumbers as art objects, the potter’s wheel he still dreams about — and his Riviera, from Villa Kérylos and the Fondation Maeght to the gardens of Menton, which he rates even higher than Nice’s own.

More on Instagram at @maxlangu.

Born With Flowers in My Head

I was born and raised in Leningrad, and I studied there too. By education I am an agronomist. Now I live in France, in Nice, but I regularly return home to Russia — my flower shop still runs in St Petersburg.

Why flowers?

It’s very simple. I think I was born with flowers in my head. As a child I was even called a “flower soul.” I was always drawn to flowers in a completely natural way. It isn’t an invented profession, not a chance hobby, not a passing whim — flowers have been with me all my life.

Professionally it all began with floristry and the flower shop. But gradually that aesthetic became too tight to stay inside flowers alone. Decorations appeared, café interiors, the first projects, then interiors, architecture and gardens. For me it’s a completely natural development: flowers, objects and space are connected, and at some point they can no longer exist without each other.

I’ve been working with flowers professionally since about 1995, with interiors since 2003. So it turns out I’m already a very elderly florist. (Laughs.)

The Client Comes to Me First

I’ll answer a little unexpectedly: clients’ tastes as a starting point don’t interest me much. What matters to me is that the client is first interested in what I do. So in a sense, I set the rules.

People usually come to me already understanding my aesthetic. Then the dialogue begins: wishes appear, we dive into a specific story, we develop it together. And that union with the client is always very interesting.

So I can’t say there is any obvious divide between the tastes of Russia and Europe. More than that — it seems to me that today the demands on floristry and decor in Russia are extremely high. Sometimes, perhaps, even higher than in Europe. I could be wrong.

But in France I still work quite often with Russian-speaking clients, so it would be dishonest to draw global conclusions. This is my third year here, and I’m still observing.

Starting Again in France

The first steps, of course, are not so simple. You find yourself inside a completely different culture — of language, business, tax, administration. First you have to understand how all the processes here work at all.

Gradually we overcame those difficulties. I had help setting up the business, and I have no negative experience whatsoever. On the contrary — once the administrative questions are behind you and the actual work begins, I feel absolutely in my element.

For now we don’t have an open bureau or shop in France that you can simply walk into from the street. We work with private and event projects, and interiors in parallel — right now, for example, we have an interior project in Vienna in its active phase, and the distance doesn’t interfere with the work at all.

At the same time, we’re negotiating over a space in Nice. But I don’t like talking about such things ahead of time. Though I’ve already said it. We have our own requirements for the space, the owner has his, and we’re both being a little capricious. (Laughs.) If it works out — wonderful. If not — then it isn’t fate yet.

The Blue Cat Named Rex

The blue cat is not a marketing story at all. Many years ago I painted a portrait of my cat, Rex. In that period I was painting quite a lot, and I made a whole series of his portraits.

Painting gives me a completely particular feeling — an incredible excitement, almost adrenaline. It’s partly comparable to working on a project when you don’t yet fully know what the result will be.

And one day my partner said: “Let’s take this cat and print postcards and stickers for the shop.” That’s how it all began, completely by accident. Then the blue cat gradually became our face.

Today in the St Petersburg shop his enormous portrait takes up practically the whole window. He appears on curtains, postcards, T-shirts. I myself have probably twenty T-shirts with the blue cat — mostly black ones. So people sometimes say to me: “Do you wear the same T-shirt all the time?” They’re just all similar. (Laughs.)

I like that there was never any strategy behind the blue cat. As, in fact, there wasn’t behind the business itself. We opened the first shop in St Petersburg in 1999 — it was only six square meters. Two years later there was a 25-square-meter shop, and everything developed step by step from there.

At one point the interior practice helped the flower business; then floristry began growing faster than interiors. That seesaw continues to this day. Right now flowers have perhaps come to the fore, but work with interiors and space always runs in parallel.

So for me the blue cat is not really a logo. It’s a very personal story that one day, completely naturally, became part of our life. He simply appeared in it and stayed.

Field Flowers and Restraint

It’s quite hard for me to talk about trends. I never particularly followed them, and I can’t say my own style has changed radically over time. Of course we transform, we look for the new, but some things stay with me all my life.

As a child, for example, I adored field flowers — and today a bouquet of field flowers can still be the ideal bouquet for me. At the same time I love an enormous number of completely different flowers. Each simply has its season, its place and its situation.

But if we’re talking about a noticeable tendency of recent years, it is without question the joining of flowers and vegetables. And here I can say we stood, in a sense, at its origins: we began actively using vegetables in our decorations fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. We had huge projects built almost exclusively on vegetables.

“The bloom and the fruit are not two different natures — they are the same story, from flowering to harvest.”

In my work I’m very interested in textures — sometimes even more than in simply beautiful things. Vegetables and flowers complement each other astonishingly: different plasticity, different surfaces, different density, but together they create a very alive, juicy composition.

And when it comes to bouquets, I like a certain restraint. Sometimes I even limit clients’ choices. If I know that many bouquets are being ordered from us for one person’s birthday, I try to make sure their home doesn’t end up containing the entire assortment of a flower shop. It’s far more beautiful when a single, considered story emerges — as if we had come and arranged all the flowers ourselves.

So I’m for modesty. But an important clarification: modesty in the choice of flowers, not in their quantity. Flowers I love in abundance. I love big, lush bouquets, big vases — and I generally believe there should be many vases.

Where Ideas Come From

Above all, nature inspires me. Sometimes you really do have to travel quite far for it — which is why I love traveling to gardens and often build my routes around them. And sometimes it’s enough to get in the car in Nice and drive into the mountains without even choosing a point on the map.

I love that state when you’re driving and suddenly meet something along the way. An enormous field of grasses, for example, moving and shimmering in the wind. You stop, you look — and almost immediately you start thinking how that feeling could be carried into the work. Recently exactly such an accidental landscape became the starting point for one of our wedding projects.

Art, of course, is a huge source — and completely varied, from the ancient to the most contemporary. I try not to miss important exhibitions and events, and sometimes I deliberately build trips around them: Art Basel, Milan Design Week, an interesting exhibition, a new museum. For me it isn’t just professional necessity — I’m genuinely interested in constantly searching for new visual horizons.

Architecture and design inevitably enter the same circle, because I continue to work with interiors. Fashion too. A good fashion show today is a real spectacle, where it isn’t only the clothes that are interesting but the space, the light, the music, the sets, the direction.

And since we’ve mentioned spectacle — theater, of course. I can go to a production with enormous pleasure purely for the scenography, immerse myself in the story of a costume’s creation, study the details and try to understand how it was all conceived.

That’s probably why it’s hard for me to name one person or artist who inspires me. I’m interested in this whole enormous visual world — nature, gardens, art, architecture, fashion, theater. Everything constantly flows into everything else, and then returns, completely unexpectedly, in your own work.

Why Cucumbers on the Tables

For me flowers and vegetables don’t contradict each other at all. On the contrary, I see a completely natural connection: first the plant blooms, then the fruit appears — they are simply different states of one nature.

What interests me above all is texture. A cucumber, an artichoke, a cabbage, a tomato — these aren’t just food but incredibly beautiful natural objects. Each has its own color, surface, form, rhythm. Placed next to flowers, they make the flowers themselves look a little different.

But of course there’s an element of épatage in it too — and why not?

“It’s very important that your work knows how to smile.”

It should provoke emotion, surprise. It’s especially interesting to take something completely familiar and exaggerate it — to use, for example, an enormous quantity of ordinary cucumbers.

We’re used to seeing them on shop shelves and perceiving them purely as a product: we choose the better ones to make a salad later. And suddenly the same cucumber turns up in a completely different context — and for the first time we begin to examine its form, its color, its texture. From an utterly ordinary object it unexpectedly turns into almost an art object.

That’s the transformation I love: flowers and vegetables remain part of one nature, but at the same time a game appears, a little provocation, and a smile.

Clay: Back to the Earth

It feels a little strange to talk about where I’d like to “grow.” Though new horizons interest me madly, of course. And the most curious thing is that sometimes moving forward turns out to be a return to your own origins.

Ceramics has always fascinated me. As a child I practiced it quite seriously for several years, so today it is in some sense a return to what was once a very important part of my life.

“A flower grows out of the earth, and clay is the earth itself — earth a person can give new form and new life.”

It seems to me that my love of plants and my love of clay grow from the same root — from the earth. And when flowers later stand in a clay vase, there’s a beautiful closed circle in it for me: as if we were returning them to the place they grew from.

So for the last few years I’ve been dreaming of my own potter’s wheel and kiln. When I was building my house in St Petersburg, a place for a pottery workshop was even planned into it. Life has changed quite a lot in recent years, and the plans changed too. So now I’m probably dreaming of a new house — or, more precisely, building new dreams. But the potter’s wheel and the kiln remain in them.

I very much want, one day, to make my own vases — and to join in a single object everything I do: flowers, form, texture, craft and earth.

Nice by Max Langu

Why Nice? I was born in deep autumn, in the north. I consider that an injustice. (Laughs.) Though I love my Petersburg very much.

For me Nice never ends at the administrative border of the city. I perceive it much more widely — as an enormous territory around it, where the sea, gardens, architecture, art, small towns and completely different landscapes exist practically side by side.

With five favorite places I have a problem — I’m completely incapable of limiting myself to five. (Laughs again.)

If we’re talking about breakfast, for example, I won’t take you anywhere at all. I love having breakfast at home, and I love to cook. It’s my personal time before the working day begins.

But afterwards I’ll gladly leave the center of Nice.

In Beaulieu-sur-Mer I will definitely show you Villa Kérylos.

Then the Fondation Maeght and Saint-Paul-de-Vence itself — for me that is an incredible concentration of art and beautiful places.

The legendary Colombe d’Or is right there, and not far away the CAB Fondation, where you can even stay in a Jean Prouvé house.

In Èze I love the Jardin Exotique — just as I do the one in Monte-Carlo.

And a completely special story, of course, is the gardens of Menton. It seems to me that in the richness of its garden culture Menton is even more interesting than Nice itself. I’ve studied practically all the gardens around by now.

But if I’m allowed to break the “five places” condition, I’ll very quickly drive even further.

To the Dordogne valley — to the gardens of Marqueyssac, which I constantly want to return to. Then the gardens of the Loire, Étretat… For me a journey in pursuit of a garden, architecture or art can continue endlessly.

And if we do return to Nice in the evening, I can offer the terrace of Le Méridien. Not for the interior, and perhaps not even for the service. Simply to sit on the open terrace and look at the sea.

“Sometimes one good view is quite enough.”

More from Locals Insider:

Max’s Riviera is part of our series of first-person city guides by the people who make beautiful things there.

For another life told through plants, Lisbon gardener Nuno Prates wrote about the best gardens in Lisbon and how he’s greening the city — the Portuguese counterpart to Max’s garden-hunting along the Côte d’Azur.

In Paris, surrealist Marie Beltrami — Jean-Paul Goude’s chief stylist for twenty-five years — wrote about fifty years in the city, from the Palace era to the bars she still returns to.

And if Max’s Riviera has you planning a French trip of your own, our guide to new, small and cozy hotels in Paris covers where to stay at the other end of the country.