True with Young Hollywood. Uh, we are in a very secret underground location right now, right? Kind of secret. Kind of secret. We want to get the secret out there a little bit. We are in the Four Seasons, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills. Our Young Hollywood studio is upstairs and you actually have We're downstairs. Has his own floral studio downstairs. Yeah, who knew? Yeah, so I, well, we've been here for like a month and so it's very exciting. So hopefully you guys can all come here and play when you're stressed upstairs, not that people get stressed upstairs in the office.

I'm going to take you up on that offer.

But everyone can kind of come down and play, exactly, 100%. Oh no, but it's like a it's a big deal that I'm back here because this is yeah. I'm going to say this is you started here, this was your home.

Exactly. Like right here. That was the first place right here. This was the first place I ever in my life touched a flower as a as a profession, so to speak. So yeah, so I'm back here 21 years later. I've been modeling in Paris and Milan and I came back to Los Angeles and I didn't have a job and I said to so many friends of mine, you know, do you know anybody that's hiring? And they said, oh, we we know of a florist that has a flower shop at the Four Seasons at Beverly Hills. And uh, let me call her. Call back two days later and said, you know, they have a big wedding this weekend, why don't you go and meet with her? And I walked through the lobby upstairs and really I was like, wow, they're creating art with flowers. And I was so impressed because uh, the owners of this hotel, they were so passionate about flowers and still are. Um, and the flowers were so beautiful. And so I was very nervous and I met with her. She brought me downstairs and she goes, you go in the cooler over there and you pick out some flowers and I want you to make something for me. And it was a room like full of really beautiful.

I don't make me nervous.

Oh, I was so nervous because I was like not only that, but then I I had my rent to pay because I was like, I need to pay my rent here. So I need to impress someone with my flower arrangement skills, which were zero at the time. Uh, so everyone kind of helped me make this floral arrangement and she hired me like two days a week.

I have a very good whiff of like multiple different flowers. Yes. Yes. But I love it. I love it. Yeah. It's it's his whole experience. Do you have a favorite?

Uh, I do. That's why I put this here. So this uh, Magnolia is my favorite.

Can I smell that?

So yeah, for sure. This was picked by my partner because I'm a huge Marilyn Monroe fan. So for weeks, this was picked from Marilyn Monroe's home in her garden.

No way.

So any of you who live, um, up on that avenue, if you saw a man with hacking Magnolias, that was him.

You just go in hack flowers wherever you can.

Yeah. But but it's a very special Magnolia. So Magnolia is actually my favorite flower. And then my favorite flowers are I love roses, I love calla lilies, I love orchids. Those are the flowers I work with the most.

Do you want to play? I want to play. Let's play. I'm ready to play. All right, let's do it. So,

Okay. Here's your black container. So if you ever So rule number one is, when I uh, start working with flowers, I always choose the container first. So the container is important. If you're using white or colored flowers, black is a great container to use because it really pops out the color. Um, and then this stuff is called, you asked me before, you're like, what is that? This is called oasis.

I was wondering what that is. I was trying to figure out what that is.

And this is floral foam. Okay. For a beginner. Not to say you're a beginner because when you're done, you'll you'll probably take over my business. But the great thing about that is where anywhere you put a flower, it kind of just stays. And so it's amazing like when you start to work.

Do you make this up as you go along? Do you kind of have like a vision in your head?

I make everything up as I go along.

Really? Yeah. So you don't have like a pre- You're like this should go with this.

Sometimes I do. Like I choose the vase or the base and then I choose the color and then whatever happens after that, just kind of happens naturally. Especially like when we're doing flowers in the lobby of the hotel, I never really say like, hmm. So what we're going to do is we're going to start with hydrangea.

Do I just like flop this in?

Well, what you can do is I'm going to show you. You can flop it in if you want to. We're here to play. There's no like wrong or right way. Okay. So I'm going to give you all your stems, babe. And then we're going to play with that.

I feel like oh this would be like a pretty wedding bouquet. Yeah, exactly. Are you married? I'm not, but good. So you better call me for your wedding. Got married. Exactly. I will.

So I'm going to give you these. So we're going to start together. So the trick is, it's called like the Latham 3s. All right? Keep everything clean, simple and chic. Got it. You can never go wrong. Okay. You never use more than three types of flowers. So today we're going to use Hydrangea, roses and Dahlias. And then the last thing is never use more than three different types of monochromatic colors. So greens, whites and creams. And like black, pink and purple such as that. So that's the Latham 3s. So we're going to start on the three corners, so to speak. Can you just put it in? You're just going to put it in the side like this, as you can see here. And you're just going to kind of build around. I need to give you a lot more.

He's so much faster than me. I'm like trying to slowly put it in here. And he's already got like

I'm going to go really slow. I usually take a lot of the uh, the leaves off.

Do you want to do you want the flowers to be close together or they close together?

Close together. Because what we're going to do is we're going to create like a collar around the arrangement like this.

You also have a lot of celebrity clients. Kris Jenner was here.

Kris was here and Sofia, Rob Kardashian called us and he said he needed 33 flower bouquets for Black China. And someone asks me the other day, they said, what is your favorite event you've ever done? And I think my favorite event is when I did Tina Turner's wedding. So that was, that was a pretty amazing moment for me. I'm going to help you.

Wait, can you can you tell us how that what was so amazing about the wedding?

It was amazing because I love working with iconic uh, people. Iconic people that really, you know, I think that uh, the the whole idea of love nowadays is kind of crazy. We live in this uh, world of, it's important but you know, where everyone's like I'm doing. I'm doing. So but you see what we've done here. You've kind of created this whole collar.

What made you actually even want to get into flowers? Like how did you did you always know this was something you were good at, that you're passionate about?

Well, when I I, like I mentioned you, I really, honestly, I didn't want to work with flowers, I just needed a job. So that's that's how it started.

So it was just like a natural talent that you just tapped into.

So it's a natural kind of thing and then I moved to Paris and it exploded and that's where, you know, the whole career. And but it's a good thing. It's kind of changed my whole life. I was knighted last year. So you can call me Sir Jeff Latham.

You were knighted. Tell me about that.

So the French government, they give uh, knighthoods every year, uh, the Minister of Culture and uh, they uh, they gave me one it was a year and a half ago. So, so now the rest of the interview you have to call me Sir.

I have to call Sir Sir Latham. Sir Latham. We're not doing it here. And you have a book.

This is actually my fourth book. But this is the newest one. Um, it's from Rizoli. You can get it on Amazon. You have Eva Longoria's first wedding. You have Avril Lavigne's. This was Tina Turner's wedding which was amazing. So we created like this huge wall of red roses. There was 163,000 red roses used in this wedding.

So does she request like I need 163,000.

We were literally standing, we were literally standing up here and um, she looked down on her garden. She's like, I always wanted these roses in my garden. And she said like everyone knows my red lips. So I said, sure, we're going to create like red around your whole garden. So that was beautiful. And then this was this gigantic flower wall that we did. Um, and with she studies Buddhism. So we wanted to have a tree, like a tree of life like like the the rise of a new day. So everything's like an amazing kind of adventure and um, every project for me is like a new project and that's holy.

You make it look so effortless.

Well, it's not effortless and it's just it's for me it's about I cannot do this without my amazing team and I have such a great team. Um, here in in Los Angeles and in Paris, we we work our ass off.

But but it's worth it in the end because it's uh, it's rewarding because we're creating art and joy at the same time. Plus we love what we do. She did this. I did this. Kind of. Kind of. You kind of did it. She did it. I put one flower.

Yeah, you did one. That's my contribution. But thanks for thanks for visiting my space.

Yeah, thank you.

It's so beautiful.

You're welcome. Anytime you're stressed, you just come

I will. Oh we will come here and hang out all the time. Down from upstairs. And visit the flower shop.

Exactly. Cool. See you.

Thank you. Thank you. Flower kiss. Flower kiss. Ciao.