Faux Plants in a Rented Flat: What Actually Works

I have decorated rented flats for the better part of fifteen years, most of them with bad light, rules against drilling, and lease terms that made it clear I would be moving within two years. Artificial plants have carried a lot of that decorating weight, but the calculation on what to buy is different in a rental than it is in a place you own. The pieces that work in a rented flat are not always the pieces that top the buying guides, and the ones that look sensible in a permanent home can be a genuine problem when it is time to leave.

This is what I have learned about buying faux plants specifically for rentals. The advice sits at an angle to the general buying advice on this site, and I think it is more useful when it does.

The three constraints a rental adds

Every rental I have lived in has had at least two of these three, and most have had all three.

First, you cannot make holes. No drilling, no toggle bolts, no picture rails that were not already there. This rules out most wall mounted planters and almost all serious hanging solutions, because the alternatives are command strips, which fail on anything heavier than about two kilos over time, and free standing supports, which take floor space you may not have.

Second, you cannot commit to the room. The wall colour, the flooring, and the light are all things the landlord chose. A jade green faux fig that looks perfect against the warm cream of the current flat may look completely wrong in the cold grey walls of the next one. Buy for versatility, not for a specific room.

Third, everything has to move. In fifteen years I have never lived in a flat for more than three years. Every plant I own has to survive being packed into a van, moved across town, and unpacked again, sometimes twice a year. The pieces that come out of that process best are not always the pieces that look best in a shop.

What to buy first

If you are decorating a rental from scratch and you want faux greenery in it, buy in this order. It is what I would do if I moved into a new flat tomorrow with a two hundred pound budget.

One large floor piece. A single tall plant, usually a fig, a bird of paradise, or a rubber tree, in a self supporting pot. This will do more visual work than any three smaller pieces combined and it can move flat to flat without needing anything installed. Budget between sixty and ninety pounds for something that reads as convincing at a distance and holds up when people sit near it. I have bought cheaper and regretted it every time, because the base of a cheap tall piece looks wrong in a way that draws the eye.

Two medium tabletop pieces. Something with trailing stems, a pothos or a philodendron style piece, on a shelf or a side table. Trailing greenery softens the hard edges of a small room in a way that upright plants cannot, and it works in almost any colour scheme. About twenty to thirty pounds each is the honest quality bracket for these.

One small piece for a desk or windowsill. Under fifteen pounds. This is the piece you will move around most often, so pay less for it and expect to replace it. The one on my desk right now is the fourth in that slot in about six years.

That is it. Four pieces, roughly a hundred and fifty pounds, and enough visual green for a one bed flat. Anything beyond this is decoration for a specific room, and I would not add more until you know how long you are staying.

The mistake most renters make

The advice you will hear most often is to buy small pieces, on the theory that they are cheaper, easier to move, and less committing. In my experience this is mostly wrong for rentals, and I want to explain why.

Small faux plants have to work harder to look convincing because you see them from close up. A five pound stem on a bathroom shelf is being examined from a distance of about a metre, and every one of the four things that make a leaf look real is being tested. Small pieces at low price points almost always fail this test, which means the room looks slightly worse for their being in it rather than better.

Large pieces are the opposite. A tall fig at the corner of a living room is being seen from three or four metres away most of the time, and even a mid range piece will convince at that distance. You get much more decorating effect per pound spent by going bigger, not by going smaller.

The other reason to go bigger in a rental is that one large piece is easier to move than eight small ones. A single floor plant fits in the back of any car. Eight small pots each need to be packed individually, and half of them will get squashed in the move. The people I know who own many small faux plants are also the people who lose the most of them each time they move.

The counterargument is that a large piece takes up floor space you may not have in a small flat. This is fair for genuinely tiny flats. In anything larger than a studio, the corner behind the sofa or beside the front door is usually wasted space anyway, and a tall plant in that spot pays back its footprint immediately. The quiet corner with one plant piece covers this argument in more detail.

Moving faux plants without damage

The best faux plants I own have made five or six moves and still look the same as they did in the shop. The pieces that have not made it were mostly killed by being packed badly on the day of the move.

The rules are simple and almost nobody follows them.

Tall pieces travel upright, in a car foot well or between two boxes so they cannot fall over. Never in a horizontal position, and never with anything stacked on top. The moment a fig leaf is pressed against a cardboard box for a couple of hours, it creases, and the crease does not always come out.

Trailing pieces have their stems loosely coiled and wrapped in one layer of tissue or plain kitchen roll before they go into a box. This takes about a minute per piece and it is the difference between arriving in the new flat with plants that need reshaping and plants that need replacing. The reshaping bent stems piece covers what to do when it goes wrong anyway.

Small pieces travel in their pots, wrapped as a unit, in a shoe box or similar. Do not empty them out of the pot for the move and repot at the new flat. The pot is often what is holding the whole arrangement in shape.

The one piece of standard advice I would push back on is using vacuum bags for the move. They compress the leaves for the entire journey and set creases that never fully come out. Boring cardboard boxes with tissue filler beat vacuum bags every time. The care section has more on the storage side, which uses the same principles.

The disposal problem nobody talks about

Faux plants are difficult to get rid of. The bad ones sit around because you feel guilty throwing them away, and the worst end up in landfill because they are made of multiple materials fused together and cannot be recycled by any local scheme I have used.

This is a real cost of buying cheap. Over ten years and five flats, fifty small unrecyclable stems would not have existed if the initial purchases had been good ones that lasted. My rough rule is that if I am not confident a piece will still look right in the next flat, I do not buy it. The full buying logic sits in the buying guides.

A final note on the light problem

Rentals often have bad light, which is one of the reasons faux plants make sense in them at all. But bad light also affects how convincing a faux plant looks. A north facing room with cool grey light is less forgiving of shiny plastic leaves than a warm south facing room.

The pieces I recommend for low light rented rooms are matte finished, mid green rather than bright green, and moderately textured. The greenery for a room with no window piece covers the extreme end of this.

Rentals are the environment faux greenery was made for. Buy the four pieces above, keep them for as long as they look right, move them carefully, and replace the small stuff when it stops earning its space.