Anniversary flowers in Winston-Salem

Anniversaries in Winston-Salem are celebrated in buildings that used to belong to the tobacco families. The Kimpton Cardinal occupies the 1929 Reynolds Building downtown, the art-deco tower whose architects went on to design the Empire State Building along very similar lines — which is why a couple can book a room in what is, in effect, the Empire State Building's older cousin, four hours from the coast. Graylyn, out on Reynolda Road, is a 1930s estate built by a Reynolds Tobacco executive, now owned by Wake Forest University and run as a conference center and hotel, and it is the address most often given when someone here says they are going away for a weekend without leaving the county. A mile from it, Reynolda House and Reynolda Gardens put formal gardens inside the city limits. Downtown, the Marriott and the Embassy Suites share the Twin City Quarter beside the Benton Convention Center; the Historic Brookstown Inn sits in an 1830s Salem cotton mill; and the Augustus T. Zevely Inn is an actual nineteenth-century house on South Main inside Old Salem, where the street is brick and the guest can hear the Home Moravian bells. Flowers waiting in any of those rooms land differently than flowers handed over at a door.

Hotel delivery has its own rules, and they are the same at every property in town. A florist cannot enter a guest room; the arrangement goes to the front desk or to bell staff, who take it up or hold it for arrival. That means three details do the work: the name on the reservation exactly as it was booked, the check-in date, and a cell number. Standard check-in here is mid-afternoon, so a piece delivered at eleven in the morning sits behind the desk for several hours — usually fine, but say in the notes whether you want it placed in the room before arrival or handed over at check-in, because those are different requests and the desk will do either. Size matters more than people expect: hotel room desks and nightstands are small, and a wide table arrangement that looks perfect in a dining room has nowhere to sit. Graylyn is the one property with genuinely different geography, since it is an estate rather than a street-front hotel and arrivals are handled at the main house rather than a lobby off a parking deck, so allow extra time and extra patience on the drive out Reynolda Road.

One piece of advice saves more anniversaries in this city than any other: do not send flowers to a restaurant. The places couples book here — the West Fourth Street row downtown, Trade Street in the arts district, Reynolda Village, the old tavern in Old Salem, the Stratford Road and Miller Street rooms — are small and staffed thin, and a bouquet dropped off at four in the afternoon waits in a warm entryway or a service hallway through the whole dinner rush, if it is found at all. Send it to the house that morning, so it is on the table when your partner gets home to change, or send it to the hotel if you are staying over. If the celebration is an anniversary party rather than a dinner, the venue makes the difference: a hotel or a club with an event desk will receive and hold an arrangement all day, and Tanglewood Park's manor house in Clemmons or a rented room in the Innovation Quarter will too, so long as somebody on site is expecting it. For a weekend up in the Yadkin Valley — the wineries out past Dobson and Ronda — the arrangement belongs at home before you leave, not chased around the county.