Leanne Ford’s Latest Design Project Features a $15 Entryway Hack We’re Stealing

At the newly opened Fox and the Fleur in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, designer Leanne Ford gave the flower shop a coat of white paint (a Ford standard), added an oversize sink for cleaning stems, and brought in a narrow wood table for displaying them. But without a lot of floor space, she had to get creative on how to display blooms—so she looked up.

Dried flowers hang from the ceiling and in the window, but there’s one wall detail that we’d like to steal for our own homes: Ford’s clever peg rail display, which holds baskets of “pick your own” flowers in the shop, but we think would also be a great entryway idea.

“I love a peg rail, and I use them constantly because they’re great when you don’t have a closet in a guest room or entry. They solve a multitude of problems,” says Ford. “If you don’t have a console for your keys, just throw them in a basket.”

Ford buys her peg rails at the Container Store (she says you can also get them at Home Depot or Amazon), paints them the color of the wall so that it disappears, and then buys vintage baskets and paints them the same shade, too.

And while we think the basket idea works great for mudroom essentials such as umbrellas, hats, and dog accessories, she says you can still use them for flowers; just add a glass vessel inside to hold water.

This is Ford’s first project in Sewickley, but she’s planting the seeds for more projects there: “I’m telling anybody who wants to open a business there that I’m basically offering my services pro bono because it’s such a beautiful little town and I want it to flourish.”