Charleston-based event planner Calder Clark has amassed a national following for her stylish soirées and her modern take on classic Southern entertaining, and her Easter brunch table is no different. For Clark, Easter is a chance to celebrate the arrival of spring, and there's no shortage of eye candy and inspiration when it comes to decorating for the holiday.
"My inspiration stemmed from that perfect celery green woven throughout nature come March, and the soft blue of the local eggs we snap up in preparation for our Easter table," says Clark, who used that color pairing as a foundation, layering in linen napkins, delicate glassware and abundant blooms to create a refined setting for her family's annual brunch celebration.
Take a closer look at the beautiful tablescape below, as well as Calder's tips on creating a layered and polished table.
Picking a binary color palette is a surefire trick for a beautiful spread. One trick deployed here is the use of the cooler tones of powder blue and celery green paired with a warm punch of peach, allowing the flowers to be the "oomph."
Monobotanic and monochromatic floral groupings ease the eye across a tablescape. If floral arranging is not in your wheelhouse, grouping by color or varietal can be a very crisp way to go. For containers, using varying sizes and heights of the same medium (Clark used glass here) is a fresh way to keep the table from looking cluttered or busy.
Let the table breathe a bit. Using delicate hand-blown glass and modern lucite throughout offers an airiness to the table and allows the beautiful blooms take center stage.
Fresh blooms on a napkin give our Easter table that finishing touch. These lucite napkin rings have a built-in slot for a single stem, making them the perfect vessel for petite blooms like narcissus.
Dip-dyed eggs in the softest pastels make for lovely table decorations as well as a great craft for children. We wrapped hard-boiled eggs with everyday rubber bands and used all-natural everyday kitchen ingredients to create our palette of desired dyes.
Place cards aren't just a formality - they offer comfort as people feel that they've been considered beforehand and placed with care. It is perfectly acceptable to choose a playful shape (here, we used die cut bunny cards and French blue calligraphy) and to use first names or even nicknames in place of full names.
These velvety green bunnies evoke a sense of garden-to-table, adding another textural element to ground the tablescape. Skinny colored tapers are so chic and give an otherwise elegant table a youthful edge. Ditch the traditional ivory tapers for 18" half tapers in a coordinated color.
Thoughtful parting favors are always a welcome surprise as guests say their goodbyes. Here we sourced vintage egg cups, filled them with fresh chamomile from the garden, and penned little tags with guest names.
And a final (and possibly the most important) tip from Calder: "Don't forget- brunch is nothing without copious amounts of champagne and crispy homemade cheese straws!"
