Preservation Press, along with Thomas Hips, is located at 118 W. Vermilion in Lafayette.

You never know when a pastime or interest will lead to a business. When Anne Venable, founder of Preservation Press in Lafayette, pressed her first flower, she was a college student just trying to decorate her apartment by recreating botanical prints from a picture she saw in a Restoration Hardware magazine.

Maybe it was opening and closing those medical school books she used to press the flowers that made the kinesiology student question her path and realize she preferred working in a more creative, self-soothing craft. Her father, a cabinet maker at the time, made her first wooden press – a 1” x 24” – and she pressed onward from there.

For four years, she continued honing her skills, learning which glue and paper worked best, which flowers held more moisture and which ones pressed the easiest and dried the most colorful. The artform was so new that when the Lafayette native began selling her works in 2015, she was the only known flower presser in the city.

She eventually went from pressing simpler pieces to herbarium boards (recreating flowers in their natural shape) and mixed media. Her first floral skull still has a modern edge today.

In 2017 Anne opened Preservation Press, and tested the market with a pop up at a friend’s salon. “My expectations were blown away,” she recalls. The day would be telling in more ways than one. Anne sold her first piece to the person she would end up marrying and training to be her lead designer.

Hannah Castille started with no experience in art or floral design, just “a love for the artform,” as she tells it. Only a year after starting, she tapped into mixed media with her ballerina designs. She has since developed a collection that captures the beauty and grace of Louisiana nature, fauna and wildlife rendered in flower petals, like her stunning blue herons made of blue delphiniums, protea, water lilies and ecru-colored roses. Her pelicans are fit for the walls of the Governor’s mansion.

Anne now celebrates foliage on a grander scale, arranging larger plants like tropicals, ferns – even sugarcane, and she does the finishing and framing that she sees suitable for their works.

Together they create original contemporary and mid-century home and wall décor most often using hand-pressed botanicals and flowers that are keepsakes from weddings, births, special occasions and a growing number of funerals.

The process of preserving flowers takes time and patience involving breaking most flowers apart and drying each petal or component. Water held in the flower parts is extracted by applying pressure in one of Preservation’s eight wooden presses that handle different size plants and flowers.

Each layer in between the press has a wood separator and sheet of watercolor paper. In the course of four to six weeks, cardboard around the white paper is changed three times a week – sometimes the paper is changed as well to keep moisture content as low as possible until all the moisture is pressed out. The water is ultimately absorbed from the petals of the flowers by the paper layered around. Once the pressing is completed, the flower head can be reconstructed.

With tweezers, an Exacto knife and a very steady hand, Hannah adheres each flower part to paper using an acid-free glue specially mixed by Anne. Her designs elevate the art of pressing, evident from the gallery of wedding bouquets, precious animal-themed nursery décor as well as floral crosses, angel wings and other religious designs.

At the beginning of this year, the business moved to downtown Lafayette. The store at 118 W. Vermilion brings extra space for materials and laying out designs. It also offers a retail front selling original pressed flower designs and prints along with a line of Italian leather bags and totes created by Anne’s father Karl Venable under the brand name Thomas Hips. The shop will soon add another line (an offset of the Hips brand) of finer goods made of alligator.

It’s been a busy year for the team (of five) at Preservation Press, with the current turnaround time for custom orders right at a year. Each month, an average of 30 orders are taken; each order may consist of around five pieces. But it’s work that Anne and Hannah seemingly thrive in doing and admittedly enjoy the escape it provides.

“I love being able to dive into new projects and use different elements,” says Hannah. “We began with Anne pressing flowers out of her mom’s garden and here we are now. I’m anxious to see where we go from here.”