Shop Spotlight: Sprout Home

Founded in 2003, Sprout Home has grown from a neighborhood garden shop into a creative hub that includes a dedicated floral storefront, design services, workshops, and a carefully curated retail experience. We caught up with Stephen Hill, Creative Director and longtime member of the Sprout Home team, to talk about creativity, curation, seasonality, and the element of surprise that keeps both the shop—and its customers—inspired.

Sprout Home has this great dual identity with the garden shop on one side and the floral shop across the street. How do you think about the relationship between those two spaces, and what does each one allow you to express creatively?

It's really amazing having these two store fronts right across the street from each other. Certainly, the visual agenda is quite similar, but I think creatively can take a bit of a different approach. Most often in gardening, our focus is on longevity and creating concepts that will mature into themselves, looking ahead to how plants will behave several years and further. Fresh flowers have a beauty to their inherent temporal qualities. In a sense, floral for events will certainly live on in professional and casual photography... In either scenario it's always humbling to think that a little bit of one's creativity and know-how will be with someone for years to come.

Your assortment spans plants, planters, fresh floral, preserved floral, home goods, and design services. How do you keep all of those categories feeling cohesive while still leaving room for surprise?

For this, I'll tip my hat to the many creative folks that have a focus both across some of these categories as well as those focused into a specific one. Who doesn't like a little surprise that makes you take a closer, second look or maybe just gives you a little chuckle. With a cohesive sensibility across the board, there's always room for an unusual houseplant (we try to have something we've never offered before on each shipment) or a sea-turtle coffee mug! Design services can offer a similar unique feature simply by listening: every situation or client will have a nuanced objective that can spark the imagination, and that's the opportunity to throw in that little loop or curve that sets it apart from anything average-feeling. As a group of creatives, repetition isn't the most exciting task. Every project is an opportunity to try something new!

Sprout Home feels especially rooted in design. When you buy for the shop, what makes an item feel unmistakably "Sprout" to you?

There are so many items that have their own quality that suits them well to the shelves of Sprout Home... First, items must be practical to use outdoors in the garden and following that, they don't necessarily have to have an exact match, but I think it's important that they can coordinate with other products featured in the store. Of course some will, and some won't, but being able to coordinate sets that can make sense in a room together is ideal. They should also each fill a niche or purpose unique to them. There's always the spontaneity of the occasional singular item, but that's where the same "room for surprise" exists. Similarly, these same concepts work for the living plants both indoors and out, our fresh flowers (which our talented team restocks several times a week) and our other offerings.

Because Sprout offers both retail and hands-on design services, you get to see how people shop and how they actually live. How does that shape the way you curate the store?

From Sprout Home's founding, it was always the goal to offer in-store visuals that inspire how people live with plants and flowers including home, work and third-spaces. In almost every retail conversation we get to offer this advice and inspiration with practical discussions of plants' light and watering needs, but also how they shape, how they grow and what feeling they impart. It can be long-winded, but there's definitely more to selecting a plant than merely "will it grow here?" Creating unique projects for private residences, showrooms, pop-ups and events is always exciting as we get to help define a place or experience with components beyond furniture, linen colors and things like that. It's really an important (and impactful!) layer to incorporate on top of other design elements.

Chicago has such dramatic seasonal shifts. How does the city, and the rhythm of the seasons, show up in the way you style the shop and guide customers through the year?

Color combinations and display focus definitely shift with the seasons. Some of this is a simple fact of our plant offerings shifting or our floral focus changing with the seasons, but we also incorporate it within our own style. Gardeners especially are incredibly sensitive to the seasons because it impacts our chore list, ha! But practically, we gear our retail store toward what everyone in the city is experiencing. Back to our topic of surprise: Sometimes the longest winter needs a tropical pop in the middle of it, and we see our flowering plants like Anthurium and Orchids seeing a surge in interest.

Classes and events are clearly a big part of Sprout Home. What do those gatherings bring to the business that traditional retail alone can't?

I love that folks get to meet each other at our classes and events—we've already checked the box that they have a similar interest! It's also a time that's paced differently than the retail setting, and folks can dig in for a little more conversational knowledge throughout the workshop experience.

You've been part of Sprout Home for years. How has your own eye evolved over time, and what are you most excited by in the shop right now?

It has been a number of years! ...I'll only say that the decade mark is long in the rearview... I think one's "eye" can evolve over time to become more of an intuition and I like to think that I can often employ this. Certainly, I like putting my logic behind it as well, but it definitely points me in the right direction. You really won me over with the element of "surprise" and truly, allowing room to even surprise myself, I think, is really important. A garden, for instance, can be by-the-book, but whose book? In my personal garden, I try to have something at every turn that will even make a seasoned gardener look a little bit closer... A team of creative people is always a perk, as there's always someone to learn from on a daily basis.

Personally: NeoCon and Design Days just wrapped up in Chicago, and that afforded me and the Sprout Home team the opportunity to work with some really fantastic folks. Next up: some summer sourcing of plants we've never carried before or some really unique specimens of favorites I haven't seen for years. I'll keep you posted...