An artist who found her medium.

I have always been an artist. For most of my career, that meant working across mediums — experimenting, exploring, and never quite settling. I also spent years in the wedding industry on the venue and food and beverage side, deeply embedded in the world of celebrations, florals, and the rituals that mark the most important days of people’s lives.

When Covid ended that chapter without warning, I found myself laid off and facing an open question: what now? I knew I wanted to build something of my own. What I didn’t know was what that would be.

Nothing felt right until the day I discovered flower preservation in resin. I can’t fully explain what happened in that moment — only that it felt like recognition. Like I had been looking for this without knowing it.

I poured my savings into testing and research. Within months I knew I had something. I launched Lush Magnolia in 2020 — and eight months later, I had a storefront. 

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“I told people I was done.”

A five years in, life asked a great deal of me all at once. A new baby. My health. The kind of accumulation that doesn’t announce itself — it just arrives, and suddenly the weight of running a studio, serving clients with the care they deserved, and taking care of myself and my family became too much to carry at once.

Stepping back from commissions was the right decision. I told my referral partners, my clients, the people who had come to know my work — I’m stepping away. And I did.

Even though the work never stopped, what I didn’t anticipate was how much I would miss the commissions. Not the business of it, but the work itself. The flowers. The resin. The moment a piece becomes something more than the sum of its materials for a client.

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Not a comeback. A refinement.

Lush Magnolia is open again for commissions — and it looks different than before. Not in its aesthetic, but in its intention. I take fewer commissions now, and I’m more selective about the ones I accept. Not because I’m precious about it, but because I’ve learned that the work is better when I give it the space it needs.

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I’m based in New Orleans, a city that has always understood that beauty and sorrow live close together — that a celebration can hold grief, that a flower can carry a whole life in its petals. That understanding is in everything I make.

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I work with brides who want to keep something real from the day that went by too fast. With families marking a loss. With collectors and designers who want something for their home that no one else will ever own. With people who simply love flowers and want them to live longer than a week.

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The work itself resists a single description. Some pieces are sculptural and commanding — they anchor a room and demand attention. Others are soft and romantic, quietly emotional, the kind of thing you notice slowly over time. I don’t force a piece into one or the other. I follow the material, and it tells me what it wants to become.

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Every commission begins with a conversation. I want to understand the space, the story, the feeling you’re trying to hold. From there, I work slowly and deliberately — selecting materials, composing botanicals, building something that earns its place in your home or your hands.

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This is not production work. It never has been. It is, at its core, the act of making something that lasts — from something that was never meant to.

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-Stephanie Young
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