Bridal’s Best
TheMostIconic BridalExperience intheWorld
FrompersonalizedstylingtoexclusiveVIPexperiences, discoverwhybridesfromaroundtheglobechooseKleinfeld fortheirunforgettable"yes"moment.
VIP BRIDAL EXPERIE I NCES E
VIP Platinum
3 hours, up to 5 guests
Take your VIP experience to the next level, featuring a 3-hour personalized bridal styling experience, dedicated accessories consultation, champagne, and light bites from Murray’s Cheese for up to five guests
VIP Luxe
3 hours, up to 5 guests
Enjoy our elevated 3-hour Luxe VIP experience in a spacious VIP room, complete with a personal bridal stylist, dedicated accessories styling, and accommodations for up to five guests.
VIP Pearl
3 hours, up to 8 guests weekends only
Available exclusively on weekends, we welcome your bridal party of up to eight guests to our elegant downstairs Bridal Lounge for a semi-private 3-hour appointment with a senior bridal stylist Complete your experience with champagne, light bites from Murray’s Cheese, and an exclusive Kleinfeld gift
VIPGold
This experience offers a luxurious 3-hour appointment in a more intimate setting, with exclusive access to the Kleinfeld salon during VIP-only hours for up to eight guests Enjoy champagne and light bites by Murray’s Cheese, dedicated bridal and accessories styling, and an exclusive Kleinfeld gift.
VIPDiamond
Experience the ultimate Kleinfeld VIP appointment with exclusive access to the entire showroom for up to 15 guests This once-in-a-lifetime 3-hour private shopping experience includes dedicated bridal and accessories styling, champagne and light bites by Murray’s Cheese, exclusive gifts and personalization, plus opportunities for additional enhancements upon request.
Explore Kleinfe f ld VIP Experiences
EVERY LITTLE DETAIL
Distinctive venues. Diverse accommodations. South Walton lets you select the exact spaces to match your fairytale vision. You’ll have refined amenities at your fingertips, plus services such as planners, caterers, florists, and musicians to help make your big day run smoothly.
YOUR HONORED GUESTS
From championship golf to award-winning chefs, these 16 beach neighborhoods will create an indelible experience for everyone attending your wedding. There are endless opportunities for exploration in the pristine natural beauty. And it all leads back to the famous sugar-white sand.
No matter your wedding style, the size of your guest list or the special touches you’re dreaming of, Hilton Sandestin Beach Golf Resort & Spa provides the perfect venue for your wedding celebration.
HiltonSandestinBeach.com • -
MIRAMAR
CONTENTS
16 Letter from the Editor
Are you a workhorse or a show pony?
20 The Perfect Registry
Check out our foolproof ideas for the perfect registry.
26 Open Bar
We tapped Omar YeeFoon, Beverage Consultant for Sandals Resorts, to whip up a fresh seasonal cocktail and mocktail your guests will love.
28 Father of the Bride
BG’s Barry Rosenbloom checks into the Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman.
30 Trending
The buzziest places and things in beauty, fashion, travel and more that’s on our radar.
36 A Real Gold Mine
Two sisters spin tech trash into fine gold jewelry.
38 Behind the Buy
Ever wonder how a bridal boutique decides which gowns earn a spot on the rack? We followed the team from Trudys Bridal for an inside look.
CONTENTS
50 The Bridal Glow-Up
Jean Godfrey-June shares 13 great ideas for beautiful, glowy skin.
54 Where Zebras Roam & Weddings Shine
Danny Seo checks into a 30,000 acre nature preserve that sets the stage for an eco-luxury honeymoon or wedding destination.
60 The Sky’s the Limit
Meet Parisian pastry chef Bastien Blanc-Tailleur who is taking wedding cakes to new heights.
66 REAL WEDDING:
Sarah and Adrian
This couple didn’t simply search for a wedding venue they wanted a feeling of community, and they found it at a family-run 14th-century castle in Umbria, Italy.
74 Something New
If you’ve seen it before, odds are you won’t see it at a wedding designed by Mindy Weiss, whose creativity in matters of design has made her one of the world’s most sought-after wedding planners.
82 REAL WEDDING:
Jeanne and Ted
This Palm Beach wedding unfolded over four days of joyous celebration—all a lifetime in the making.
88 REAL WEDDING: Chris and Andrew
For this Australian couple, marrying at Lake Como’s Villa Erba was never going to be a simple wedding. Instead, they organized a full-blown production.
96 A Passion for Pearls
A wedding mainstay, pearls are more popular—and varied—than ever. If you know how to appraise and shop for them, the world’s your oyster.
102 REAL WEDDING: Shana and Adi
On Blue Stallion Farm, the couple— along with mother-of-the-bride
Gany Lalo—turned their Florida backyard into a wedding venue, building nearly every element by hand.
108 Up and Away
They may be young, but Bianca Hall and Erica Vanco of Estera Events have earned a reputation as two of the country’s top ultra-luxury destination-wedding planners.
116 The Master of Movement, Light & Lace
After nearly three decades in bridal fashion, Reem Acra reflects on timelessness and the philosophy that continues to define her iconic bridal house.
122 SPECIAL SECTION: The Caribbean
Discover our ultimate guide to The Caribbean—a premier destination for weddings and honeymoons where white sands meet white glove service.
Irecently returned from a pretty epic trip to Cap Juluca, A Belmond Hotel in Anguilla.
I was a guest of superstar event planner Michelle Rago, who is hosting a series of curated dinners with Belmond—bringing together fascinating people who love great food, the arts, and, perhaps most importantly, the art of throwing an unforgettable wedding.
One of the guests on this trip was Rishi Patel, the wedding and event designer behind some of the world’s most extraordinary celebrations. The statistics behind his events are almost unbelievable: 25,000 hydrangeas grown by a Dutch farmer to achieve the exact shade of blue for a Cape Cod wedding; 175,000 red roses flown in for an Indian affair; even planting an entire field of flowers a year in advance so it would bloom at the precise peak of perfection on event day. At press time for BG, he had also been tapped to design the opening celebration for the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago. Like Michelle, he’s the real deal.
So it was a bit surprising to see this superstar designer in Anguilla lugging several incredibly heavy suitcases filled with exquisite tabletop pieces for our finale dinner at Cap Juluca. While I luxuriated on the beach, I watched him styling, hauling, arranging, and personally crafting the most beautiful table for our outdoor feast. Even with teams of people helping produce his famously over-the-top affairs, it wasn’t beneath him to carry every detail himself—checked luggage and all—to make sure the evening was just right. No team. Just the master himself getting it done right.
And that brings me to a question I often ask people: Are you a workhorse or a show pony?
Because when it comes to the very best people in weddings—the ones catering to billionaires, celebrities, and the world’s elite—you always want a workhorse on your side.
In this issue, we feature beautiful real weddings created by some of the industry’s very best. But we also spotlight a deeply personal DIY affair with equally stunning results. My dear friend Gany Lalo—founder of Blue Stallion Farm and co-founder of Invicta Watch Group—created a fairy-tale wedding right in the front and backyard of her Florida farm. It wasn’t about saving money. It was about making sure every detail felt right, every moment felt intimate, and every choice reflected the values and aesthetic of her family.
Yes, the results were stunning and undeniably photo-worthy. But more importantly, the setting felt personal and familiar, giving guests a sense of ease that allowed everyone to truly relax, celebrate, and have fun.
And perhaps that’s the lesson in all of this: no matter who you are, where you are, or what you do, there’s something deeply admirable about rolling up your sleeves and getting the job done yourself.
Your Workhorse, Danny Seo
Picture your wedding in the Caribbean. The best part? Maybe it’s the ease of having every detail handled by our expert wedding concierge team. Or maybe… it’s this: when you book 7 or more nights in a Club or Butler Suite, your wedding is on us. Call it our gift to you.
Editorial Director and Publisher Danny Seo Danny@bridalguide.com
Art Director Michael Wilson
Home Editor Kelli Lamb
Fashion Editor-at-Large Corinne Pierre-Louis
Digital Marketing & Content Coordinator for BridalGuide.com Kristen Klein
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Leslie Garisto, Jean Godfrey June, Megan McCarty, Barry Rosenbloom, Sandra Soria
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
David Engelhardt, Davis Gerber, Jonas Jungblut, Lost in Love Photography, Osiris Photo & Film, Collin Pierson, Alicia Rinka, Rikki Snyder, Audra Wrisley
ADVERTISING
Executive Fashion Advertising Manager Rachel Dichter Capo Rcapo@bridalguide.com
Senior Advertising Director Steven Ritterman ritterman@bridalguide.com
TRAVEL
North America: Colleen Schoch Morell, ckschoch@me.com Caribbean & Europe: Viveca Caldara, viveca@vcmedia.es Mexico: Anabel Rodriguez, anabelrg503@gmail.com
General Manager, VP Yelena Malinovskaya
Production Director William L. Zi
ADVERTISING SALES OFFICES North Avenue, #706, New Rochelle, NY 10804
President Barry Rosenbloom
Founder Mike Rosenbloom
DISTRIBUTED BY
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by RFP Corp.
Monique Lhuillier Bliss
diamond tulips necklace; $799.99; kay.com
Manolo Blahnik patent leather loafers;
Gucci Horsebit diamond ring; $7,000; gucci.com
Van Cleef & Arpels Felicite wedding band; $8,100; vancleefarpels.com
Patek Philippe; $67,517; patek.com $1,245; mrporter.com
Start Your Story Here
Heartfelt hospitality has been a cherished part of our culture, a defining part of our heritage for generations. In Charleston, graciousness isn’t just a gesture; it’s a way of life. And we can’t wait to welcome you. Whether you envision a grand affair at a full-service resort, an intimate garden celebration, or a weekend-long gathering at a storybook bed & breakfast, the Charleston area offers the perfect setting for every wedding style.
KELLI LAMB, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF OUR SISTER PUBLICATION RUE, BRINGS HER EXPERT EYE FOR THE FINEST IN HOME DESIGN AND EVERYDAY LUXURY.
Warm Paradise
Bring the honeymoon home with a registry inspired by warmweather entertaining. From citrus juicers to outdoor pizza ovens, our list blends laid-back luxury with practical pieces. You and your betrothed will enjoy alfresco meals, sunset cocktails, and e ortless entertaining year-round.
East Fork Watercolor Diamonds Table Linen $250; eastfork.com
Gozney Dome Pizza Oven $2,300; us.gozney.com
Pigment France Marseille Leather and Rattan Glass Pitcher $525; abask.com
Perch Mortar and Pestle $150; holcombstudio.com
Joanna Buchanan Tropical Cocktail Picks $98; joannabuchanan.com
revolve.com
Serena & Lily Ives Tiered Server $198; serenaandlily.com
Organic Resort Stripe Towels From $19; parachutehome.com
Le Creuset Alpine Outdoor BBQ Tools $195 for 5; williams-sonoma.com
SMEG Retro Juicer $230; crateandbarrel.com
Holcomb
Parachute
Vaisselle Amphora Vase $173;
Eye-catching design, iconic blending power, and up to 10-year warranties make Vitamix the perfect addition to your wedding registry. Learn more at vitamix.com.
Bring the heart of your home into the future with a registry inspired by the clean lines and understated warmth of Ali Larter’s Idaho home. Think sleek appliances, handcrafted ceramics, and streamlined storage solutions. Designed for life after “I do,” this collection helps newlyweds create a home that makes cooking together, hosting friends, and everyday moments feel special.
DAVID ENGELHARDT
Inspired by the eclectic charm of Drew Barrymore’s upstate home, this registry is lled with orals, whimsical patterns, and vintage-inspired touches that make a house feel lived in and loved. For newlyweds who gravitate toward collected-over-curated style, these pieces bring warmth, character, and a welcoming spirit to the home they’ll share.
Marisa Klaster HandTurned Wood Salt and Pepper Grinders $570; abask.com
$70; shopinnerchild.com
obakki.com
Z.D.G. Picardie Stemmed Glass $165; zdgo cial.com
match1995.com
From $50; ilbucovita.com
Moccamaster by Technivorm KBGV 10-Cup Co ee Maker From $370; williams-sonoma.com
Il Buco Vita Flora Dinnerware
MATCH Lucia Serving Fork & Spoon Set $234;
Antique Bronze Serving Tray $194;
Inner Child Hand-Marbled Scallop Waste Bin
Matouk Cairo Towels From $45; matouk.com
Bordallo Pinheiro Cabbage Chargers $160; williams-sonoma.com
DAVID ENGELHARDT
Open Bar Turks and Caicos
Our resident mixologist, Beverage Consultant for Sandals with a new lineup of fresh, avorful, balanced cocktails perfect for This time, Omar draws inspiration Sandals’ stunning Grande St spirited bourbon-forward creation refreshing zero-proof option to skip the alcohol.
Omar Yee Foon Resorts—is back and beautifully your wedding day.
Lucian, serving up a alongside a for guests who prefer
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JONAS RECIPES BY OMAR
JUNGBLUT YEE FOON
ISLAND ORCHARDAPPLE CIDER AND CHAI MOCKTAIL
GATHER:
3 oz Apple Cider
2 oz Brewed Chai Tea (served cold)
½ oz Simple Syrup
½ oz Lemon Juice
MAKE IT:
1. Within the hi-ball glass, build the drink, adding each ingredient
2. Top with ice
3. Mix using a bar spoon
4. Garnish with fresh mint
FOREVER GOLD
GATHER:
1 ½ oz Bourbon
½ oz house falernum
½ oz mango puree
½ oz lime juice
½ oz simple syrup
2 dashes angostura bitters
MAKE IT
1. Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice
2. Shake hard for 7 seconds
3. Pour into an old fashioned glass
4. Top with Ice
Island Royalty
FROM OCEANFRONT SUITES AND CANDLELIT
DINNERS TO INDULGENT SPA RITUALS AND SUNSET SAILS, OUR RESIDENT JETSETTER BARRY ROSENBLOOM DISCOVERS WHY THE RITZ-CARLTON, GRAND CAYMAN IS THE ULTIMATE CARIBBEAN ESCAPE FOR COUPLES PLANNING A DESTINATION WEDDING, HONEYMOON, OR ROMANTIC GETAWAY.
Not every dream honeymoon requires a transatlantic flight or a connection through three time zones. Grand Cayman — a British Overseas Territory tucked into the western Caribbean — makes a compelling case for closer to home. The island is compact, safe, and effortlessly sophisticated, with warm turquoise water so clear you can see the bottom from a boat, a legendary stretch of white sand called Seven Mile Beach, and a culinary scene that punches well above its size. Nonstop flights from New York take just under four hours, and the cab ride from the airport to your hotel is barely 15 minutes. By the time most couples would be reaching their first connection, you’re already on the beach.
THE HOTEL
The Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman is the undisputed anchor of Seven Mile Beach — a Forbes Five-Star, AAA Five Diamond resort that has been setting the standard for Caribbean luxury for two decades. The property blends modern coastal elegance with mid-century British Caribbean style, its design paying quiet homage to the island’s culture and natural beauty. Local artwork lines the hallways, and custom ceramics from island artisans are tucked into arched niches at
every room entrance — details that make the place feel rooted rather than generic. Request an oceanfront room or suite. Waking up to an unobstructed view of the Caribbean from your private balcony is the kind of thing that makes a honeymoon feel like a honeymoon.
BEACH & WATER
The resort’s private stretch of Seven Mile Beach is as good as advertised powdery white sand, calm water, and the kind of turquoise color that
doesn’t look real in photographs. The property has two pools, each with a distinct personality: one lively and social, the other quiet and serene. Complimentary sunscreen is stocked poolside — a small touch that speaks volumes about the level of attentiveness here. For couples who want to venture beyond the beach, the resort can arrange the island’s single must-do experience: Stingray City. About 25 minutes by boat, it’s a shallow sandbar in the North Sound where dozens of wild southern stingrays have gathered for decades — so accustomed to visitors that they glide right up to you, velvety and surprisingly graceful. It is, by any measure, one of the most memorable wildlife encounters in the entire Caribbean. Don’t skip it.
DINING
INSIDER TIP
Upgrade to a Club Level room.
The Club Lounge serves food all day long, the fresh juice flows freely, and wine and cocktails too. Factor it all in and the upgrade more than pays for itself.
The resort’s dining lineup is deep enough to fill an entire week without repeating yourself. The crown jewel is Blue by Eric Ripert — an oceanfront restaurant from the chef behind New York’s legendary Le Bernardin, and one of the most celebrated tables in the entire Caribbean. If a full dinner feels like a big commitment on night one, start at the Blue bar. The bartender and sommelier here are people who clearly love what they do — knowledgeable, warm, and genuinely enthusiastic about what they’re pouring. Work through the cocktails and the appetizers, which read like a greatesthits of Ripert’s cuisine. Trust us: you can more than make a meal out of the bar menu. For something more unexpected, Taikun — the resort’s Japanese sushi lounge — is worth a night. Start with a sake flight from what is reportedly the largest sake selection on the island, follow with sushi, tempura, and pillowy bao buns, and watch the kitchen grate fresh wasabi tableside from the whole rhizome. It’s theatrical in the best possible way.
Where moments become
What’s Trending
WELCOME TO YOUR INSIDER EDIT ON WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO USE, AND WHAT TO BUY RIGHT NOW—FROM BUZZWORTHY DESTINATIONS AND CAN’T-MISS OPENINGS TO THE PRODUCTS EVERYONE IN THE KNOW IS OBSESSED WITH. HEERE ARE A FEW OF OUR FAVORITE PLACES AND THINGS.
–THE EDITORS
MAUNA KEA BEACH HOTEL
Set along the crescent sands of Kauna‘oa Bay, Mauna Kea Beach Hotel remains one of Hawai‘i’s most iconic oceanfront resorts, celebrated for its midcentury design and timeless island elegance. The legendary property has emerged from an extensive multi-million-dollar renovation that refreshed guestrooms, dining venues, wellness spaces, and pools while carefully preserving the original vision and architectural spirit envisioned by Laurance Rockefeller. The transformation arrives just as the resort celebrates its milestone 60th birthday. maunakearesort.com
Tom Ford Sunlit Rose lip balm $62;
Guest in Residence Collegiate Stripe polo $445; guestinresidence.com
Chloe Summer Banana tote bag
VILLA SAN MICHELE, A BELMOND HOTEL
Perched in the hills of Fiesole overlooking Florence, Villa San Michele, A Belmond Hotel is a former 15th-century monastery transformed into one of Tuscany’s most romantic luxury retreats. Recently restored, its Michelangelo-attributed façade, terraced gardens, and sweeping views create a setting where Renaissance history meets refined modern indulgence. Fall is arguably the most magical season to stay, when the summer crowds thin and crisp evenings make sunset aperitivos overlooking Florence feel especially cinematic. belmond.com
The Row Marlo tote bag
ME BARCELONA HOTEL
Located just o Passeig de Gràcia in the heart of the city, ME Barcelona boasts a prime location steps from luxury boutiques, celebrated architecture, and some of Barcelona’s most vibrant dining and cultural destinations. The hotel brings a sleek, design-forward energy with contemporary interiors, rooftop glamour, and panoramic city views that balance cosmopolitan sophistication with Mediterranean ease. Fall is an especially ideal time to stay, when Barcelona’s summer heat softens. melia.com
Sydney Evan 14K gold and emerald hoop earring $3,600; bergdorfgoodman.com
byredo.com
A Real Gold Mine
TWO SISTERS SPIN TECH TRASH INTO FINE GOLD JEWELRY—AND EVERYONE WINS (ALONG WITH THE PLANET).
STORY BY SANDRA S. SORIA
“We’re aiming to become the Cartier of sustainable jewelry,” declares Karen Chave, “We want to be known for that same quality and prestige but built on an entirely di erent foundation, one where circular sourcing and transparency are not the exception, but the standard. Our goal is to build a heritage brand that rede nes how jewelry is made.”
So, note the name Incador, a London-based ne jewelry brand co-founded by Karen and her sister Alice Chave a scant two years ago. They seem to be just the right pair to stake that lofty claim. Both are engineers—Karen studied chemical engineering and Alice environmental—who came from a family of engineers. “So, we were always trained to think in systems,” Alice says. “Looking back, engineering taught us how to break down complex
problems, understand how di erent parts connect, and make decisions in a logical, analytical way, which has been very helpful in building something from scratch!”
Couple that with a creative streak—a love of design and art, storytelling, and content creation—and the picture begins to take shape. Add to that, their family tradition involved giving jewelry as gifts to mark occasions and signal memories. “The real “aha” moment was recognizing that Karen and I were the right people to bring this idea to life,” Alice says. “We had the technical understanding from our engineering backgrounds, combined with this desire for creative storytelling. We knew it was a unique opportunity to bring industry and luxury together in a way that hadn’t been done before.”
They turned to tech waste upon learning just how much of it there is. Electronic waste, or e-waste, is one of the fastest growing solid waste streams in the world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) accounting for more than 68 million tons of waste in 2022, with only 22 percent of it formally recycled. That number is set to explode as technology is viewed as more disposable.
The sisters wanted to be part of the solution—a closed loop solution—by mining the pure 18-karat gold hiding in circuit boards. “The idea came from my time at Power for Planet,” says Alice, “where we were repurposing organic waste into green energy. I loved the concept of transforming something overlooked into something valuable and that mindset stayed with me. When I started looking into electronic waste, I realized how rich it is in precious met-
als, which felt like a huge, untapped opportunity.”
The challenge was in nding electronic waste processors and gold re ners who would work with them on a boutique scale, as well as seek out workshops in London that were willing to work with recycled gold. Their willingness to pay a premium for close relationships with these industry partners and the resulting transparency—not to mention the beautiful backstory they gain for their works—the sisters broke the chain. “We’ve been very fortunate to nd partners who believed in what we’re doing from the beginning.”
Incador jewelry is particularly appealing, they feel, to their own generation. Their fellow Gen-Z-ers—the rst fully digital-native generation, who also happen to be of marrying age—are interested in both individual style and sustainability. But typically, on the other hand, the designs for engagement rings could be classi ed as, well, pretty generic. “Around 75 percent of our work is bespoke and it’s happened very organically,” Karen says. “I think it re ects a shift in what people are looking for. Couples don’t just want to buy a piece of jewelry anymore, especially for something as signi cant as an engagement ring where intention and individuality will mean so much.”
The sisters take individuality and transparency to the next level. Every piece of jewelry comes with its own “passport” in the form of a discreet
QR code that unlocks its full provenance, detailing its origins and the speci c batch of electronics it was recovered from. It’s all part of their commitment to ethical luxury, where sustainability factors into a ne jewelry piece’s distinction. “There is real value in things we overlook every day,” Karen says. “The gold sitting in unused devices is the same gold used in ne jewelry. It hasn’t lost its quality, just its visibility.”
They carry that commitment to the gemstones that stud their pieces, seeking out partners in this equally opaque industry who share their ethos. “Similar to our approach with gold,” Alice says, “we try to get as close to the source as possible and work with suppliers who Because bespoke jewelry varies so much in design, we work with a range of gemstone suppliers. That said, there is one we’re particularly excited about and building a long-term relationship with a Swiss company creating lab-grown diamonds using renewable energy, including solar and hydro power.”
It’s all about rewriting the story of what ne jewelry in general—and at the same time giving the pieces a story of their own. “Our interest in jewelry comes
from a love of storytelling and expression,” Karen says. “We’ve always felt that jewelry, particularly a heirloom piece, holds meaning in a way other everyday objects do not. Jewelry can be worn daily as a form of expression, it’s expressive, it’s individual. We design with that in mind, creating pieces that are personal and intentional.”
Part of their story is in the name of their company itself—their personal story and the story of gold itself. As engineers, they recognize the shiny metal as more than a “canvas for design,” but a 4.6-billionyear-old metal—the only naturally golden metal found on Earth. “We wanted to honor the origins of the material and the history behind gold itself,” Karen says. “That’s where the reference to Inca culture comes from. At the same time, ‘or’means gold in French, re ecting our background. Incador, therefore, is a combination of the material’s origin and our own identity.”
Behind The Buy
EVER WONDER
HOW
A BRIDAL
BOUTIQUE DECIDES WHICH GOWNS EARN A SPOT ON THE RACK? WE JOINED THE TEAM FROM TRUDYS BRIDES — A SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTION SERVING BRIDES FOR 50 YEARS — AT THE NATIONAL BRIDAL MARKET CHICAGO FOR AN INSIDE LOOK.
STORY BY MEGAN McCARTY PHOTOGRAPHS BY JONAS JUNGBLUT
The showroom floors of a bridal market hum with an anticipatory energy, not unlike a wedding. Racks of gowns — draped on models, mannequins, and hangers alike — line the walls as buyers from the country’s top boutiques move between appointments. They review fabrics, silhouettes, and details that will shape the season ahead. For Trudys Brides owner Steven Blechman, every purchase is made with one person in mind: the bride.
“It’s not really about what we like,” Steven says. “It’s really the customers.”
Founded by Steven’s parents, Trudy and Roger Blechman, the boutique has spent half a century outfitting brides across Northern California. Steven carries the mom and pop spirit forward, cultivating close relationships not only with brides but with the designers themselves. At market, Steven and General Manager and Buyer Didi Stout meet with a tight roster of trusted partners — Maggie Sottero, Morilee, Enzoani, Allure Bridals, Eddy K, and Mon Cheri among them working collaboratively to bring the right mix of gowns back home.
THE STRATEGY
BEHIND THE SELECTION
The Trudys team comes to Chicago prepared. Months of conversations with designers and in-store feedback from brides shape a clear plan. By the time Steven and Didi hit the floor, they’re not browsing. They’re executing a strategy built for the Trudys bride, based on what customers are asking for, which styles are selling well, and where gaps exist in their current inventory.
At the heart of that game plan is evolution, not reinvention. The strongest designers, Steven says, refine what already works: a new sleeve treatment here, a reimagined neckline there, a subtle shift in silhouette on an already beloved gown. These fresh takes on proven designs often resonate most with brides. “When designers lean into that, our girls are smiling, and they know a dress could be a winner,” Steven says.
A typical buy might run 20 to 24 pieces. Roughly 60 percent is
dedicated to restocking bestsellers — styles that have already earned their place on the floor and in brides’ hearts. “The tested and tried and true,” Steven calls them. The remaining 40 percent is reserved for emerging trends that designers have found success with or brides have been asking for.
WHAT’S COMING DOWN THE AISLE
This season, sleeve treatments are having a major moment — delicate, considered details that add a romantic dimension to any silhouette. Defined waists continue to reign, while beaded gowns are making a confident return.
The color palette is equally refined. Designers are leaning into softer, timeless ivory-on-ivory tones. Overall, the mood is romantic and classic, with a subtle shift away from the ultra-sheer, “naked” aesthetic that has dominated the industry in recent years.
From delicate sleeves to ivoryon-ivory color palettes and show-stopping beaded details, the bridal looks coming down the runway at the National Bridal Market Chicago signal a return to soft romance.
“Everyone’s going a little more tasteful, a little more traditional,” Steven notes.
SETTING THEM APART
What truly sets Trudys apart isn’t just the selection; it’s the depth of relationships behind every dress on the rack. Steven and Didi approach market as partners, not just purchasers. They share dinner with brand leadership, bring sales data to the table, and advocate specifically for the California bride. That collaboration translates
directly to the in-store experience.
The boutique hosts exclusive preview events, giving brides early access to new collections. Their consultants are genuine experts in each designers’ aesthetics, guiding brides with insight and intention. The goal is to create a connection, not just between bride and dress, but between bride and designer. “I want every bride who comes into our store to feel like we’re an amazing representative of that brand,” Steven says. It’s a commitment that extends
beyond any single appointment. With a wide range of styles, sizes, and price points, Trudys is designed to meet women at every stage, whether they first walk through the doors for a prom dress, return for a wedding gown, or shop years later for another milestone moment.
“It’s not just about ringing someone up at the register,” Steven says. “There’s so much fear that goes into women shopping — moms, brides, prom girls. We make them feel like we’re their hype people, and when they
Trudys Brides owner Steven Blechman (above center) and General Manager and Buyer Didi Stout (above left) move between showroom appointments, reviewing silhouettes, studying fabrics, and handpicking gowns for their San Jose boutique.
look in the mirror they feel amazing.”
After five decades, that focus remains unchanged. The process may start on a buzzing showroom floor in Chicago, but it ends in a personal, once-in-a-lifetime moment: a bride seeing herself in the dress for the first time. Fifty years of earning a bride’s trust doesn’t happen by accident — it grows one appointment and one perfectly chosen gown at a time.
“We’re in a business of making dreams come true,” Steven says. “And I don’t take that lightly.”
CORINNE PIERRE-LOUIS FASHION EDITOR-AT-LARGE
PIN THIS The Autumn Aesthetic
The beauty of a fall wedding lies in its versatility. It’s a season that o ers a rich backdrop—crisp air, candlelit receptions, and an inherent sense of romance—that can be interpreted through almost any bridal aesthetic. For some brides, that means full-on glamour with dramatic silhouettes and luxurious fabrics; for others, it’s clean lines, timeless structure, or softer, more ethereal details. But if there’s one guiding principle, it’s this: fall doesn’t de ne a bridal look. It simply provides the perfect setting for one’s personal style to shine.
Katherine Tash Bridal
FOR THE GLAMOROUS BRIDE
Autumn is naturally suited to entrance-making gowns, making it the quintessential moment for brides to embrace drama. Three-dimensional embellishments, rich satin, and accessories guests remember long after the reception ends all feel at home here. Sweeping ball gowns, cathedral-length trains, and mermaid silhouettes bring an unmistakable sense of celebration, as well. The key, however, is restraint, as glamour should be refined rather than overdone. Think luxury with just a hint of theater.
Wona Concepts
Lihi Hod
Yulila Lobachova
Nardos
FOR THE MODERN BRIDE
Brides drawn to nontraditional silhouettes or a less-is-more approach will find that sleek designs are especially striking this time of year. Crepe, satin, and silk create a clean foundation, while thoughtful details like high necklines, sculptural draping, open backs, and shorter hemlines give minimal gowns a sharper point of view. Here, the focus is less on embellishment and more on intention; pieces that are at once polished and quietly impactful.
Clio Peppiatt
Renhue
Berta
Alon Livne
FOR THE ROMANTIC BRIDE
There’s something undeniably dreamy about autumn’s crisp air and changing leaves, which is what makes the season particularly fitting for brides who gravitate toward softness and movement. Flowing A-line gowns, delicate all-over lace, airy layers of tulle, and coquette-inspired add-ons bring a sense of romance without feeling overly precious. Subtle pastel hues and champagne undertones are also beautiful elements for individuals who subscribe to this bridal style.
Honor
Lee Grebenau
Odylyne the Ceremony
Eva Lendel
LOPESAN COSTA BAVARO RESORT, SPA
& CASINO
FOR THE CLASSIC BRIDE
Some gowns never require reinvention, and for the traditional bride, timelessness itself is the ultimate luxury, especially in the fall. Ball gowns, A-line silhouettes, and sweetheart and bateau necklines remain enduring staples of bridal fashion in the autumn, while diamonds and pearls provide the perfect finishing touch. After all, true classics never lose their appeal, regardless of the season.
Anne Barge
Savannah Miller Soucy
Enaura
The BRIDAL GLOW-UP
13 GREAT IDEAS TO MAKE A BEAUTIFUL GLOW EVEN SIMPLER TO ACHIEVE, HOW TO FIX A STREAK, AND MORE
STORY BY JEAN GODFREY-JUNE
Getting a glow perfect for your wedding day—and/or your honeymoon—is way easier than you think. Because you want your skin to stay healthy and beautiful as long as your marriage does, tanning in the sun—or worse, in a tanning booth—is out. But self-tanner is undeniably faster and more reliable in terms of results anyway.
While many people love an in-salon spray tan, the beauty of self-tanning at home is you can take the tanner with you to touch up, deepen, or otherwise adjust while you’re on your honeymoon. Doing it at home is also decidedly more a ordable, less time-consuming, and better for your lungs (some of any spray, even an at-home one, ends up in your lungs, but the way many salon spray-tans are administered can involve serious clouds of self-tanner).
But whether you do it at the salon or at home, as with any pre-wedding treatment, self-tanning is de nitely worth getting the hang of well in advance. Finding the right product in the perfect shade for your skin (and being able to make sure it looks beautiful against your dress) is important, but how you apply it makes a huge difference in how natural the tan looks.
1
Start with a great self-tanner. Mousse is especially easy to blend; the one from Saltyface comes in two shades that look incredibly natural on a wide variety of skin tones, it smells like nothing, and dries quickly yet very rarely streaks.
Saltyface Tanning Foam, $59, saltyface.com smells like nothing, and dries
2
Blending is easiest with a foam mitt. This keeps the palms of your hands from getting stained with the tanner, and it helps tremendously in evening out the amount of tanner that you’re massaging into your skin.
Vita Liberata makes several (along with a great tinted foam tanner in 3 di erent shades). The brand even makes a dedicated back-application tool made out of the same material as the mitt.
• Vita Liberata tanning mitt, $9, vitaliberata.com
• Vita Liberata The Mousse $40, vitaliberata.com
• Vita Liberata back tanning applicator, $17, vitaliberata.com
4
3
The essential to an even, streakless, splotchless, glowing tan is not, as the back of many self tanner boxes would have it, exfoliation. Exfoliation is great but not necessary for a great self tan—what you need is moisturizer: lotion, cream, or balm, applied anywhere your skin is thicker or drier, like your elbows, ankles, toes, or even knees. Dry or rough skin absorbs more selftanner than the surrounding skin, creating dark splotches; moisturizing those areas evens your tan like nothing else. Smooth something like Weleda’s rich body butter between your hands (this also helps sidestep inadvertently tanning your palms), then dab the extra on the dry spots.
• Weleda Skin Food, $22.99, weleda.com and Whole Foods, Target, etc
If you forget about moisturizing and apply the tanner first, simply go over the drier areas with moisturizer afterwards: the result will be the same. A no-hands moisturizer like the faintly minty Hippie Stick from Jones Road or the tangerine-andaloe-infused After Sun stone from Kate McLeod make it even easier.
• Jones Road Hippie Stick, $36, jonesroadbeauty.com
• Kate McLeod After Sun Stone, $38, katemcleod.com
5
With the dry spots fully moisturized, you’re ready for self-tanner. Begin with your feet, which are by far the most challenging body part to self tan, in part because your feet are home to fully 25% of your body’s bones, so there are some odd angles. Then there are multiple zones of thicker (at your ankles and toes) and thinner (by your Achilles tendon) skin; it’s a lot to navigate. So devote a good deal of your blending energy here, along with extra moisture for the dry spots.
6
From your feet, move upwards over your legs. There’s no such thing as overblending for legs: you want no blotches and no streaks. And use a generous amount of tanner—it’s very hard to overdo it on legs.
7
You can tan all over, but you don’t have to. There’s no need to do your whole body unless you’d like to. Consider who might be seeing you naked if you’re only going halfway, however.
9
After your hands are dry, dab a little tanner on the back of one hand, then rub the backs of your hands together, blending. Remember that feet and hands are the hardest to blend seamlessly, so take extra time, don’t use much tanner, and dot moisturizer anywhere your skin is drier or thicker—like your knuckles.
10
Most self-tanner dries pretty quickly, so don’t feel you need to wait to put clothes on. But don’t shower until 6-8 hours have passed, which is the time self-tanner takes to fully develop. Throw on loose, darker-colored clothes and go about your day.
11
While many formulas are designed to be no-transfer (Saltyface is especially great in this regard), know that the tanner will really be fully no-transfer once you do shower, after the 6-8 hours. Of course, because our skin is shedding all the time and because with self-tanner you’ve essentially dyed your skin, you may get what looks like transfer around a collar or a cuff here or there, but it will wash away easily.
12
8
Once you’re finished, really wash your hands, even if you used a mitt.
• Pacha Bar Soap, $6.99, pachasoap.com and Whole Foods
If you do notice splotches or streaks after the tanner’s developed, they’re generally pretty easy to fix. Massage a wet washcloth into too-dark spots; you can also use any sort of exfoliant—chemical or physical or both—to lift off some of the darkened skin. Mutha makes a gorgeous exfoliating soap bar that’s perfect for this purpose.
13
For spots you missed entirely, go back and dab on additional tanner with the mitt, only in the spots that are too pale, remembering that these spots will now need 6-8 hours to develop.
Where Zebras Roam Weddings & Weddings Shine
A 30,000-ACRE NATURE PRESERVE SETS THE STAGE FOR AN ECO-LUXURY RESORT WITH PRISTINE BEACHES, PLUSH VILLAS, AND EVEN HERDS OF WILD ZEBRAS.
STORY BY DANNY SEO PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVIS GERBER
MMexico’s Pacific coast may not be the first place that comes to mind for a destination wedding or honeymoon, but this extraordinary estate deserves a spot at the top of the list. With its cinematic architecture, impeccable service, rich history, and immersive natural beauty, Cuixmala—a pre-Hispanic word meaning “the resting place of the soul”—offers a kind of luxury that feels entirely singular.
That’s because Cuixmala didn’t begin as a resort at all. Originally conceived as a private retreat for British-French financier Sir James Goldsmith, the estate spans more than 30,000 protected acres where zebras graze alongside cattle and tropical birds streak across the sky in flashes of color. The result is a rare blend of untamed wilderness and refined luxury. You can easily imagine James Bond arriving by boat at the private beach club or the women of Sex and the City gathering at the bar for cosmos—but one thing is certain: this is no ordinary resort.
At the heart of Cuixmala is its iconic main villa, a dazzling collection of white-and-saffron buildings crowned with Moorish domes and open to the ocean breeze. Once the family’s original residence, the villa now houses a restaurant, with sweeping staircases cascading down to the property’s stunning, Instagram-worthy pool. Breakfast on the outdoor patio comes with breathtaking, Savannahlike views, where you can watch herds of zebras migrating across the landscape in the distance.
Guests can choose from three distinct accommodation styles. Casa Cuixmala, the main residence, offers suites and bungalows with convenient access to the restaurants, pool, and beach. The private Villas provide complete seclusion, featuring multiple bedrooms, plunge pools, and expansive open-air living spaces. Meanwhile, the newer Casitas—10 residences ranging from one to three bedrooms—are nestled around the estate’s coconut groves. Every option feels exceptional, and for couples considering a full-property wedding buyout, the layout offers the perfect balance of privacy and togetherness for guests. Honeymooners often choose one of the casitas or private villas scattered across the property, each individually designed with four-poster beds draped in gauzy linens, hand-painted tiles, and sweeping terraces overlooking the Pacific.
What makes Cuixmala particularly relevant in today’s hospitality landscape is not simply its design but its operating philosophy. Long before sustainability became a branding exercise in luxury travel, the estate invested heavily in conservation and self-sufficiency. The surrounding reserve protects lagoons, coastline, and wildlife habitats, while the property’s organic farm supplies much of the produce, dairy, and meat used in its restaurants. Menus lean heavily on ingredients sourced directly from the estate: tropical fruit, fresh cheeses, eggs, vegetables, and locally caught seafood.
Food at Cuixmala is closely tied to the estate’s agricultural operation, which supplies much of the
BEST TIME TO VISIT
DECEMBER–MARCH
Best Overall
Expect the most comfortable weather, lush scenery, excellent beach days, and lower humidity. This is also peak season, so rates are higher and availability can tighten around holidays.
JANUARY–MARCH
Best for wildlife
This is a great time for whale watching off the Pacific coast, plus birdlife around the estate is especially active. Nearby Pacific whale migration season generally peaks in late winter.
APRIL–MAY
Best balance of weather
Warm, mostly dry conditions remain, but with fewer visitors and often better value.
JULY–OCTOBER
Green/rainy
season
The landscape becomes dramatically lush and beautiful, and the property feels quieter and more secluded. Expect tropical afternoon showers, higher humidity, and occasional storms. This period can be magical if you like nature and privacy, but less ideal for guaranteed beach weather.
produce and dairy served across the property. The on-site organic farm produces vegetables, tropical fruit, herbs, and eggs while nearby coastal waters provide much of the seafood featured on the menus. The sister property Hacienda De San Antonio provides coffee, freshly made ice cream and cheeses, and even handmade soaps used in both properties. Service follows the tone of the property itself—attentive but deliberately understated. There is little of the hyper-visible management style common at newer luxury resorts. You won’t find DJs blasting music at the beach, guests rushing to secure beach chairs in the morning,
or waiting in line to get a seat in the restaurant. While it runs as a hotel, it really feels like you’re staying in a billionaire’s private estate where the schedule is focused on your whims and needs. Staff members tend to operate with familiarity and discretion, and the experience encourages a slower rhythm rather than tightly programmed itineraries. Days are structured around horseback riding, boating, surfing, yoga, or simply moving between the beach, the pools, and long outdoor meals.
The highlight is the private beach club. Playa Cuixmala stretches wide and largely undeveloped, without neighboring hotel towers or commercial activity. While it has all the silence and feel of a private island, it’s fully staffed with a sumptuous lunch menu, full bar and equipment for all types of water sports. Chartering a boat is a must: If you’re lucky, you’ll find yourself what feels like an AI-generated movie scene of hundreds of dolphins swimming by you, jumping into the sky and speeding gleefully next to you.
Weddings are inherently stressful, but hosting a destination wedding at Cuixmala can ease much of that pressure. The staff is exceptionally equipped to manage the logistics, allowing guests to focus less on coordination and more on the beauty of the estate itself. What ultimately sets the experience apart, however, is the atmosphere: calm, unhurried, and deeply restorative. That sense of ease shapes the entire celebration and often makes the occasion feel even more memorable.
GETTING THERE:
The nearest airport is Playa de Oro International Airport in Manzanillo, approximately 90 minutes from Cuixmala. The property can also arrange private charters from various points in Mexico.
For couples looking to decompress after the intensity of a wedding, Cuixmala also works beautifully as a honeymoon retreat. The property offers space to indulge, recharge, and fully disconnect—whether that means long afternoons by the beach, private dinners under the stars, or simply settling into a slower rhythm together before beginning a new chapter of life.
PARISIAN WEDDING CAKE DESIGNER
THE SKY’S THE LIMIT
BASTIEN BLANC-TAILLEUR TURNS FANTASY INTO REALITY.
STORY BY CHRISTINE RICHMOND
No idea is too fanciful for Bastien Blanc-Tailleur. Since starting his wedding and event cake business in 2015, the Parisian pastry chef has dazzled partygoers around the world with his showstopping creations. He crafted an 11-foot cake adorned with more than 4,000 hyper-realistic sugar roses. He designed a gopher cake nearly as tall as a human, standing on its hind legs in an edible flower meadow. And he hung eight intricatelydecorated cakes from the ceiling for a wedding at the Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte, a 17th-century French palace. The cake concepts he dreams up start as hand-drawn sketches, and he gives his imagination free rein. “When I draw, I don’t think too much about how the cake is actually going to get made,” he says with a laugh.
It takes months for him and his staff of 12 to turn these ambitious ideas into reality. They complete about 20 such projects across the globe each year. “People find us by word of mouth,” Blanc-Tailleur says. Many of his clients are high rollers—members of royal families, for example— or high-profile brands like Cartier. But he works with nonbillionaires, too. “Last year, we had a really nice project in San Francisco where the cake was a gift for the bride,” Blanc-Tailleur says. “They were lovely and super interested in the process.”
Depending on where in the world the event is happening, that process can include shipping portions of the cake in custom-made crates to its destination, where Blanc-Tailleur personally assembles it and gives it the final touches. (Flying a cake on a client’s private jet usually isn’t an option because it’s too large to fit, he says.)
“PEOPLE COME TO US FOR OUR VISION AND OUR FRENCH TASTE AND OUR SAVOIR-FAIRE.”
No two cakes are alike—Blanc-Tailleur never repeats a design—and each one is made entirely by hand. A scholar of French baking heritage, Blanc-Tailleur has an extensive collection of antique reference books and pastry molds. But there’s a mad scientist side to him as well; he’s constantly experimenting with new techniques and pushing the limits of what’s possible. He fine-tuned a recipe for “dough flexible enough to create a wrapping effect” and can transform sugar into just about anything, from astonishingly realistic flowers to delicate embroidery to the slate dome of the above-mentioned Chateau de Vaux-leVicomte (he made a meticulous replica that took 350 hours to complete). “People come to us for our vision and our French taste and our savoir-faire,” Blanc-Tailleur says.
He began cultivating that savoir-faire as a child growing up in Annecy in southeastern France. His grandmother, an avid baker, taught him how to prepare traditional holiday pastries that adorned the table during family feasts. That began a passion for celebratory baking, and when Blanc-Tailleur was a young teenager, he moved to Normandy to work as an apprentice pastry chef. He climbed the culinary ladder from there, working as a sous chef at several Michelin-starred restaurants. Fast forward to 2023: His business earned a prestigious “Living Heritage Company” (EPV) label from the French government, given to companies that demonstrate “rare know-how” and a “mastery of traditional or high-tech techniques.”
It’s Blanc-Tailleur’s elaborate decorations that earn him accolades, but the flavor of the cake is just as important to him. The chef especially loves working with fresh fruits like apricot and herbs like lemon verbena. “I actually hate chocolate cake myself,” he admits. “I’ve eaten too much chocolate in my life as a pastry chef.” Plus, he says, chocolate doesn’t look the prettiest when it’s time to cut the cake. Of course, he’ll make a chocolate cake if that’s what his client wants, but his favorite projects are the ones where he’s given total creative freedom. “We have some clients who completely trust us to make whatever we want, and it’s rewarding to deliver something better than they expected.”
HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT WEDDING CAKE
Whether your wedding will be a lavish affair or an intimate get-together, Blanc-Tailleur’s practical tips will help make your day even sweeter.
DECIDE ON A STYLE.
Be honest: Do you love the idea of a jaw-dropping showstopper cake? Or would you actually feel a little silly standing next to a confection that’s larger than you are? Blanc-Tailleur enjoys making “small and chic” cakes just as much as ones that require an extension ladder.
BE REALISTIC ABOUT THE BUDGET.
Choosing a cut-rate baker and then insisting on a complex design that’s beyond that person’s expertise is a recipe for disaster. The end result will disappoint you, or worse, it could collapse or otherwise fail in front of all your guests. You’re better off being clear about what you can spend and working with an experienced vendor to create the very best cake you can afford, Blanc-Tailleur says.
TASTE. A LOT.
It’s cake—it should be delicious. Schedule tastings when deciding between vendors. Then taste some more to help you land on the perfect recipe for your big day.
ALLTOGETHER
SARAH LEONARD AND ADRIAN WYLAND DIDN’T SIMPLY SEARCH FOR A WEDDING VENUE — THEY WANTED A FEELING OF COMMUNITY, AND THEY FOUND IT AT A FAMILY-RUN 14TH-CENTURY CASTLE IN UMBRIA, ITALY.
STORY
BY MEGAN
McCARTY
PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUDRA WRISLEY
TOGETHER NOW
AAtop the Sina Bernini Bristol hotel in Rome, with terracotta domes and ancient ruins stretching in every direction, Sarah Leonard and Adrian Wyland marveled as more than 100 of their favorite people gathered on the other side of the world — for them. After months of planning anxiety, a calm washed over Sarah. “I saw my friends and family together and thought, This is why we’re here,” she says.
That communal spirit shaped their three-day celebration, as guests traveled from the Eternal City to the Umbrian countryside. The weekend felt less like a formal fête and more like being welcomed into an Italian family home — if, say, that home were a medieval castle built in the 14th century.
Early Days
The couple’s story began in a considerably less cinematic setting, at a college charity dance competition. Sarah, then a senior, was paired with Adrian, a shy sophomore with what he describes as “two left feet,” simply because they were the tallest participants. “I had no business doing a dance competition,” Adrian says.
Though they didn’t take home the prize some of Adrian’s fraternity brothers got a little too festive before the performance, disqualifying their team — they left with something better. Friendship slowly evolved into a relationship, carrying them from Chicago to business school in London to New York, where they now live.
When the topic of engagement arose, Sarah insisted on a couple of conditions: the proposal had to be a surprise, and ideally while her nails looked good. Adrian succeeded on one count.
In the private basement dining room of a London restaurant, a server handed
Sarah what appeared to be a cocktail menu. Instead, it was a custom illustrated booklet Adrian had commissioned from a Chicago artist, tracing their relationship through drawings. On the opening page, a ginger-haired man stood beside a brunette woman, followed by the pair standing outside of their Chicago home, address included. Sarah flipped through the pages distractedly, searching for the champagne list, until Adrian nudged her. “Sarah, pay attention,” he said.
Her nails were four weeks grown out and she was dressed head-to-toe in black — “like a funeral,” Sarah laughs — but that no longer mattered, especially since both of their families had flown in for the surprise.
Following the Feeling
A destination wedding wasn’t the original plan. After the engagement, the couple spent a couple of weeks traveling through
Italy and found themselves enchanted by its unhurried pace and sense of community. “It was calm and comfortable, and we felt very at home there,” Sarah says.
Back in Chicago, they toured more than 20 venues trying to recreate that warmth. Nowhere came close. Eventually, they stopped resisting the obvious, and to their surprise, their parents enthusiastically embraced an Italian wedding.
Their planner, Lisa Jaroscak Chin of Elegante Weddings and Events, who had studied opera in Perugia, Umbria’s capital, steered them toward the region. It’s Tuscany’s quieter, more authentic counterpart, she told them. The venue she recommended, Castello Di Petrata, was built in 1340, making it one of Umbria’s oldest working estates, surrounded by olive groves and orchards. It’s run by a father and his two sons — one the chef, the other managing the business while the patriarch tended the gardens
himself every day. “We wanted something very local and mom-and-pop,” Sarah says. “Like a grandma making pasta.”
They signed the contract before ever visiting.
Days to Remember
The celebrations began with rooftop welcome drinks in Rome before guests boarded buses together for Umbria the next morning. (Sarah and Adrian arranged transportation so no one would have to navigate winding roads in a rental car.) Once at Castello Di Petrata, guests indulged in la dolce vita via a pizza-and-pasta party with a gelato cart, live Italian music, and dancing that stretched unexpectedly late after one of the venue owners casually stepped behind the DJ booth himself.
“WE WANTED SOMETHING VERY LOCAL AND MOM-AND-POP. LIKE A GRANDMA MAKING PASTA.”
On the wedding day, Sarah got ready beneath a pergola overlooking the countryside in a tulle KYHA gown — not the sleek silhouette she once imagined, but the dress that felt right after stressful shopping experiences elsewhere. “Completely unexpected,” she says, “but it fit the venue.” She changed twice more before the night ended: into a satin slip dress for the hora and cake cutting, then into a minidress for the dance floor.
The ceremony, officiated by Sarah’s cousin, wove personal storytelling with Jewish tradition as family members each delivered one of the Seven Blessings. Cocktail hour followed on the garden bluff, a jazz band playing beneath the open sky. “It was the perfect post ceremony setting,” Adrian says. “It was a relaxed atmosphere, with all of our friends in a single place mingling with our families, listening to amazing music.”
Dinner, a feast of truffle pasta and short rib, unfolded al fresco across long serpentine tables. Between then, the couple shared their first dance as Mr. and Mrs. to Aretha Franklin’s “You Send Me,” carefully choreographed, though no one accounted for Sarah’s heel to briefly get caught in the cobblestones.
Later came a champagne tower and a millefoglie, the traditional Italian “thousand-layer” pastry, assembled by the couple in front of their loved ones, its delicate layers symbolizing the many layers of a life built together. Then a saxophone player led guests toward a hidden space behind the villa, where they were met with disco lights and fog machines to pack the dance floor until nearly sunrise.
By 5:00 a.m., guests jumped in the pool.
“The whole point of a destination wedding for us was having everyone together,” Adrian says. “Not just for one night, but for days. Watching our friends become close with our families — that’s what I’ll remember forever.”
After the wedding, the couple slipped away for a mini-moon in Puglia at Masseria Calderisi, then months later enjoyed a formal honeymoon in Japan. In Tokyo they stayed at the Okura, then retreated to Beniya Mukayu, a secluded ryokan tucked deep in the woods. There they spent several days wearing kimonos, soaking in onsen baths, and embracing the same sense of calm and connection that defined their wedding weekend.
Stationery:
Rentals:
Noleggio
Gown:
Tuxedo:
“THE WHOLE POINT OF A DESTINATION WEDDING FOR US WAS HAVING EVERYONE TOGETHER. NOT JUST FOR ONE NIGHT, BUT FOR DAYS.”
Planner: Elegante Weddings and Events
Venue: Castello Di Petrata
Video: Diego Perrini Video
Beauty: Sara Onori
Florals: Bird and Bumble
Entertainment: Blue Moon Italian
Jazz Band
Mite Print
Preludio Divisione
KYHA
P Johnson Tailors
IF YOU’VE SEEN IT BEFORE, ODDS ARE YOU WON’T SEE IT AT A WEDDING DESIGNED BY MINDY WEISS, WHOSE CREATIVITY IN MATTERS OF DESIGN HAS MADE HER ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST SOUGHTAFTER WEDDING PLANNERS.
STORY BY LESLIE GARISTO PFAFF
SOMETHING
NEW
“ SO THAT’S COOL. ISN’T THAT COOL?”
Mindy Weiss, Hollywood’s most celebrated wedding planner, is talking about her latest partnership with a sense of excitement most people would reserve for an exclusive deal with, say, the British royal family. Never mind that excitement seems to be Weiss’s default emotion: The fact that she’s debuting a line of wedding-themed Ring Pops—the oversize engagement-style rings whose baguettes aren’t just candycolored but actual candy—clearly tickles her because it’s so, well, her. “When they told me Bazooka owns Ring Pops, I said, ‘I am Bazooka. I am that person. I understand your whole brand. You don’t have to explain it to me.’ Because Ring Pops are brilliant,” she says.
That’s Weiss in a nutshell: equal parts fun and brilliance, as playful as pink bubblegum and inspired as a live oak carpeted in white roses (one of her inimitable strokes of wedding design genius). That combo—along with her reputation for crazy creativity, and her kind and calming presence—has made her the go-to planner for the likes of Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin, Ellen DeGeneris and Portia De Rossi, and Sacramento Kings point guard Russell Westbrook and his now-wife, Nina, not to mention a gaggle of Kardashians. But while she’s delighted to work with the A list, it’s clear that she’s got an A list of her own, and every couple whose wedding she’s helped to orchestrate is on it. What she loves most about what she does, she says, “is becoming part of
people’s memories. You’re surrounded by people who are happy, so every weekend, there’s something to look forward to.” And it doesn’t matter whether those happy people are today’s It Couple or a couple of unknowns. After virtually every event, she thinks the same thing: “Look what we did!”
And really, everybody’s looking, because at a Weiss-designed wedding there’s so much to look at, whether it’s a colorful explosion of boxed grasses dyed in exaggerated harvest hues or an outdoor wedding “pergola” comprising a quartet of olive trees. Weiss says she inherited her penchant for creativity from her parents, who were famous for their “crazy, creative parties—a little daring, a little funny.”
Her entrée into event planning stemmed from another penchant, this one for paper. After her own wedding, she was looking for a way to spend her time, and she found herself hanging out at an LA stationery store called William Ernest Brown, admiring (and buying from) their collection of high-quality paper goods. (“I’m a paper-holic,” she admits.) One day, she simply asked the manager for a job and was hired on the spot. After four years, she and the woman who hired her (who’d since become one of her best friends) started their own invitation business out of Weiss’s home. Sometimes, clients were so impressed with her creations they’d ask her to plan their entire event, but she wasn’t interested. “I didn’t want to work on the weekends,” she says.
Then, in the early 1990s, a client she was particularly close to begged Weiss to plan her father’s 75th birthday, and she agreed. “And that one party lit the light bulb,” she says. From that single event, she got ten more, and she’s been on that exponential trajectory ever since, weekends be damned.
For Weiss, inspiration is everywhere, especially at the thrift shops she frequents as an inveterate collector. For Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco’s wedding, for example, she collected vintage oil paintings and set them up in little cubbies behind the bar. Recently, she did the same thing with botanical prints in gold frames lightly sanded to lend a feeling of long use. “I always like to do something special with the bars,” she says, “because people spend a lot of time at the bar.”
PORTRAIT BY JOHN AND JOSEPH
Mindy’s Top-Ten Hotels
VENUES SO SPECTACULAR, YOU JUST MIGHT CONSIDER TYING THE KNOT TEN TIMES OVER.
San Ysidro Ranch
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA
John and Jackie Kennedy honeymooned here. Vivian Leigh and Laurence Olivier (the original Cathy and Heathcliff) married at midnight among its legendary gardens. The setting is quintessential Santa Barbara: palms and sycamores, olive trees and citrus groves, the heady scent of orange blossoms, and a pervasive sense of perfect tranquility, all backed by the picturesque San Ysidro Mountains.
Castiglion del Bosco, a Rosewood Hotel MONTALCINO, ITALY
This isn’t a hotel: It’s an entire tiny village (known, in the Tuscan hills that swaddle it, as a borgo) set in a 5,000-acre vineyard famed, since the 19th century, for its production of the prestigious red wine known as Brunello di Montalcino. Founded in the 12th-century, its stone castle holds sway over a grouping of charming pink-sandstone houses topped with traditional barrel tiles, in a romantic setting that’s the very essence of romantic Tuscany.
Hotel Bel-Air
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
The iconic pink hotel is set among lush tropical gardens, and swans glide across its private lake. This is
vintage Hollywood ushered dramatically, and luxuriously, into the 21st century.
The Surrey NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Whether you choose one of its elegantly decked-out private rooms or its breathtaking rooftop garden, you’ll be surrounded by postcardperfect visions of the city celebrated in this Upper East Side haven.
Montage Los Cabos
CABO SAN LUCAS, MEXICO
Imagine exchanging vows under towering saguaros just feet from the turquoise waters of the Santa Maria Bay, at a hotel that’s boldly modern but all of a piece with its stunning desert setting.
Amangiri
CANYON POINT, UTAH
Inside and out blend seamlessly, and red rock country starts literally at your feet, in this sleekly modern hotel set among the stunning desert vistas of the Colorado Plateau.
Four Seasons Resort Napa Valley CALISTOGA, CALIFORNIA
It’s the only Napa resort set in a working vineyard, and the only one where you can celebrate your big day under the soaring beams of the Vineyard Barn. Rustic
perfection, yes, but pure luxury as well: This is a Four Seasons resort, after all.
Four Seasons Resort Cabo Del Sol
CABO SAN LUCAS, MEXICO
Mexican chic meets Mediterranean chill meets Four Seasons je-ne-sais-quoi in this modern hacienda-style village set in the aptly named Golden Corridor of the Baja Peninsula. Overlooking the Sea of Cortez, this resort hotel redefines the word “breathtaking.”
Blackberry Farm
WALLAND, TENNESSSEE
Whether you choose it for its sweeping Smoky Mountain views, its working farm where heritage sheep and heritage produce grow in happy harmony, or its 4,200 acres lovingly tended by the Beall family who make it their home, this is a venue unlike any other.
Casa de Sierra Nevada, A Belmond Hotel
SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE, MEXICO
In Mexico’s fairytale of a city, this hotel in the luxury Belmond chain is a fairytale venue, comprising six historic houses with inner courtyards, terraces, and gardens, and a setting, filled with fountains and overflowing flowerpots, that’s pure magic.
The same thing, of course, is true of the tables. Weiss understands that guests can end up staring at the table, on and off, for up to four hours, so she hunts down interesting vintage vases to hold floral centerpieces and vintage bowls to contain personalized matchbooks. While scouring the shops for a bride-to-be who loved all things vintage, Weiss found a dealer who was selling 20 old bells of varying shapes and sizes. She bought them all and threaded them through the floral centerpieces. “They were just bells,” she says, “but I thought, Wedding bells?”
Fashion shows provide equal inspiration, in part because fashion designers, like Weiss herself, are always looking to the fu-
Castiglion del Bosco
ture. “I’ve seen so many things coming from Dior, Chanel, Gucci—all these wonderful designers are helping us for the next season,” she says. A wall of flowers that served as the backdrop for a Dior show inspired a similar flower wall at a recent Weiss-designed wedding. And a fashion show for the French designer Jacquemus, who mowed an aisle through a field of lavender in Provence, is now on Weiss’s bulletin board awaiting the perfect event.
Of course, some of her inspiration derives from the Pinterest boards her clients show her, though, she says, “I always try to elevate or change things because I don’t want my clients to have the same event over
and over again.” But some clients lack a clear vision of what they’re hoping for, so she asks them to bring in one item—a photograph, say, or a flower—and uses that single item as a jumping-off point for the design of an entire event.
The biggest change she’s seen in weddings over her three decades as a planner has been the increasing importance of wedding fashion. “Back in the day, the only thing my brides might change into was a beautiful little suit,” she says. In the age of Instagram, on the other hand, a bride typically goes through two to three changes of attire, from a gown to a less formal dress for the reception to an even more relaxed outfit
for the after party. And long gone are the days when a groom might defer to the bride in the choice of his wedding wear. “We have a whole world of men concerned with what they’re wearing,” Weiss says.
In fact, the bride’s outfits, and increasingly the groom’s, also offer inspiration for the wedding design. “I really find it hard to design without seeing the dress,” Weiss says. “It tells the story.”
Sometimes, the destination sets the stage, and Weiss is, in fact, known for her fabulous destination weddings, from Mexico to Morocco and beyond. One of her most exotic destinations was an Indian jungle; for the ceremony, the groom rode
“ I REALLY FIND IT HARD TO DESIGN WITHOUT SEEING THE DRESS. IT TELLS THE STORY.”
get off the plane, you’re at the location, and you leave when the event is over.” (Perhaps not surprisingly, her favorite wedding destination is the American Riviera, otherwise known as Santa Barbara.)
in on an elephant. But she notes that destination weddings carry their own set of challenges for a planner. You may not find local vendors who can provide what you need, so you often end up packing suitcases with linens and other wedding accessories—something that doesn’t always pass muster with customs officials, who might
suspect you plan on selling them and levy you accordingly. You’re likely to be more challenged by last-minute snafus. “You can’t just call your rental house and say, ‘I need twelve more heaters,’” Weiss notes. And like a performer on tour, you probably won’t get to see much of the place you’re traveling to. “You’re there to do the job,” she says. “You
No matter: Weiss is a seasoned campaigner, and virtually nothing fazes her, including a demand for an elephant (remember that Indian wedding?) on the morning of the ceremony. She learned early on that if she flipped out, everyone around her would do the same. “You do a lot better when everyone trusts you and everyone’s happy,” she says. “So I always stay calm, and it spreads.”
In fact, she thrives on last-minute challenges, like the decision one couple made to turn their engagement party into a 250-guest wedding eight days before the event. “I truly love last minute,” she says, “and in my head, it’s like a game show.” To emphasize the point, she hums the Jeopardy theme. “I literally hear it and go, This is amazing.”
Because not all of us want our big day to feel like a game show appearance thrust upon us without warning, Weiss wrote what’s become something of a wedding planning bible, The Wedding Book (Workman). (She also wrote a companion wedding
organizer, The Wedding Planner and Organizer, and two wedding-themed children’s books, Goldie, the Hand-picked Flower Girl and Jack Brings the Rings.) The Wedding Book has received hundreds of five-star reviews, and customers have called it “the best resource out there,” “the only book you’ll need to plan a wedding,” and “a lifesaver.”
Five-star reviews are gratifying, of course, but perhaps not as gratifying as the thanks Weiss received for what she calls her “two greatest successes,” the weddings she planned for her sons. The second of those events, for instance, was held just
last year, on a Hollywood sound stage she filled whimsically with vintage lampposts and life-sized tree cutouts. “Guests walked in and said, ‘Are you kidding me?” Weiss remembers. But her son’s response was the one she treasured most. “He noticed everything—every candy dish, all the printed materials, everything,” she says. “He came up to me and said, ‘This is the best day of my life.’ I love all my clients, but boy, when your own child is blown away, there’s nothing better.”
Not even a wedding Ring Pop with your name on it.
THE
WORTH WAIT
JEANNE BRANTHOVER AND TED BLOUNT’S PALM BEACH, FLORIDA WEDDING UNFOLDED OVER FOUR DAYS OF JOYOUS CELEBRATIONS — ALL A LIFETIME IN THE MAKING.
STORY BY MEGAN McCARTY
PHOTOGRAPHY BY COLLIN PIERSON PHOTOGRAPHY
“Iwill never, ever get married again,” Jeanne Branthover emphatically told Ted Blount on their first date. Less than two years later, the couple stood hand-in-hand at The Beach Club in Palm Beach, exchanging vows in a glamorous celebration filled with happy tears.
Jeanne, Vice Chairman at DHR Global Executive Search, had been reveling in single life, traveling between New York and Palm Beach, serving on the croquet committee at The Beach Club, and building a full life with a tight-knit circle of girlfriends. She was not looking for a husband.
Then one night, tucked into bed with a visiting girlfriend, scrolling through Hinge “like sorority girls,” a profile appeared. Jeanne swiped left. “Whoa, whoa, whoa — bring him back,” her friend insisted. “He’s perfect for you.”
The profile belonged to Ted Blount, Chairman of Blount Fine Foods, a widower who had been on exactly one date in his entire life — with Judy, his first wife. After losing Judy following a long illness, Ted joined Hinge at the encouragement of his son Todd and found himself drawn to Jeanne’s opening line: The key to my heart is kissing and ice cream. “A lot of people online don’t show enthusiasm,” Ted recalls. “She did.”
Over the next year, Ted proved himself as husband material. He introduced Jeanne to his closest friends, one of whom raised a glass at their first dinner together and told her, “We are so happy you are in Ted’s life, because we thought he’d never smile again.”
“Every time I was with Ted, he showed me another part of him that I loved,” Jeanne says. “He’s kind. He’s smart. He’s adventurous. A Renaissance man! He’d say, ‘All I want to do is make you happy.’ Who says that?”
One year after their first date, Ted got down on one knee to propose during Valentine’s Day dinner at Mastro’s Steakhouse in Scottsdale.
Party Time
Initial thoughts of eloping were quickly discarded for a four-day celebration with 160 loved ones across Palm Beach’s most iconic settings. “Ted said, ‘I want the world to know that I am marrying you,’” Jeanne remembers. Events included a bridal luncheon at
Swifty’s at The Colony Hotel, a playful morning at the National Croquet Center, and an intimate family-only rehearsal dinner. The energy ramped up for the welcome party the evening before the wedding, which happened to fall on Halloween.
Jeanne and Ted opted for an Old Hollywood-themed costume party at the Hilton West Palm Beach. They arrived as Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, a choice they paired with last-minute lessons at, naturally, Fred Astaire Dance Studio. Jeanne wore a
dren from each side served as flower girls. Both had written their own vows and, without planning it, opened with the same story of Ted’s marriage question and Jeanne’s firm no. The room erupted in laughter before dissolving into tears. “I knew when I got to the last line that if there was one more line, I wouldn’t make it,” Ted says.
The Beach Club, selected because “they really treat us like gold,” Jeanne says, was transformed so completely that guests barely recognized it. Different-sized tables with
“I WANT THE
WORLD TO KNOW THAT
I AM MARRYING YOU.”
hot-pink feathered gown; Ted completed the look with a tuxedo, cane, and top hat.
“My friends still say it was the best party they’ve ever been to in their entire life,” Jeanne says. Their wedding planner, Meredith Falk of GLDN Events, wisely enforced a reasonable bedtime. “I would have partied all night,” Jeanne admits. “And so would our friends.”
The Main Event
The wedding day evoked timeless Palm Beach elegance. While Jeanne got ready in the penthouse suite at the White Elephant alongside her granddaughter, daughterin-law, and closest girlfriends, a woman appeared and asked for her feet. Ted had arranged a surprise massage. “Your husband wanted to make sure you were really relaxed,” she said.
Jeanne wore a champagne-colored Oscar de la Renta gown with a slit — “elegant, but old enough to be appropriate and young enough to be cool,” she says — accessorized with Roman Malakov Diamonds jewelry. Ted wore a custom tuxedo by Carlos Amorim.
Jeanne’s sons, Pearce and Ross, walked her down the aisle, while Ted’s son Todd stood as best man. The youngest grandchil-
distinct floral arrangements and décor filled the ballroom. Cocktail hour featured shot glasses of clam chowder and other soups, a nod to Ted’s family business, the largest fresh soup manufacturer in the country.
At the reception, each of their children gave speeches. Every one ending the same way, riffing on Jeanne’s lifelong motto: How lucky are we? After dinner, a brass ensemble led guests into Mario’s Lake Ave, which transformed into a speakeasy styled after the Carlyle in New York. Guests enjoyed espresso martinis, ice cream, and live music until 1:00 a.m. “We have to admit,” Jeanne laughs, “that a lot of our crowd were not 22 years old.” They stayed anyway.
Back at the White Elephant, Ted insisted on carrying his bride over the threshold. Instead, in a fit of laughter, they promptly tumbled to the floor together. “It’s the thought that counts,” she told him.
The newlyweds honeymooned at Sandy Lane in Barbados, where on their last night, the patio singer closed her set with Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” their first dance song. Ted asked Jeanne to dance — again.
“I have waited for him my whole life,” Jeanne says now. “I honestly pinch myself every day.”
On the Itinerary
EVERY STOP ON JEANNE AND TED’S WEDDING WEEKEND WAS QUINTESSENTIALLY PALM BEACH.
Bridal Luncheon at Swifty’s at The Colony Hotel: A Palm Beach institution, The Colony set an elegant tone for the festivities ahead.
Bachelor’s Gathering at Sailfish Point: Ted celebrated with friends at his private waterfront enclave outside Stuart.
Welcome Party at Hilton West Palm Beach: On Halloween night, guests gathered for an Old Hollywoodinspired costume party where Jeanne and Ted danced the night away as Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.
Ceremony & Reception at The Beach Club: Palm Beach’s storied private club, an institution in the city since 1941, hosted the main event. Décor and florals transformed the space so thoroughly guests barely recognized it.
Speakeasy-Style Afterparty at Mario’s Lake Ave: A Lake Worth favorite, Mario’s was transformed into a glamorous speakeasy styled after the Carlyle in New York, with espresso martinis, ice cream, and live music.
Farewell Brunch at The Cove at The Four Seasons: The weekend concluded with waterfront views and a relaxed send-off at The Cove, where Jeanne serves on the board — making it as personal as it was picturesque.
Wedding
Venue:
Makeup:
Gown:
Stationery:
Entertainment:
Officiant:
Rentals:
Stylist:
Draping:
SHOW TIME
FOR AUSTRALIAN COUPLE CHRIS KOIKAS AND ANDREW LASALA, MARRYING AT LAKE COMO’S VILLA ERBA WAS NEVER GOING TO BE A SIMPLE WEDDING. INSTEAD, THEY ORGANIZED A FULL-BLOWN PRODUCTION.
STORY BY MEGAN McCARTY
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LOST IN LOVE
PHOTOGRAPHY
IF
you’re going to ask 95 loved ones to fly across the world for your wedding, make it worth every mile. For Chris Koikas and Andrew Lasala, that meant celebrating at a historic Lake Como villa with a burst of daytime fireworks, an opera singer serenading dinner, performers with disco balls descending a grand staircase — and one very famous next-door neighbor.
Between exchanging vows and cutting their millefoglie cake, Chris and Andrew treated guests, most of whom had flown in from Australia, to a cinematic experience.
(Fitting, given that Ocean’s Twelve and the music video for Gwen Stefani’s “Cool” were both shot at the venue.) “The most important thing was entertainment — making sure that everyone was having an awesome time,” says Chris.
The event was years in the making. The couple first connected in 2016, when Andrew sent Chris a message on Facebook. “He told me he thought I was very handsome,” Chris recalls, laughing. “I had a quick look and liked what I saw. Before you knew it, we were meeting up for Mexican food.”
Nearly a decade later, Andrew orchestrated a proposal at The Londoner Hotel in
London, booking out the top-floor bar and recruiting the staff as accomplices, all under the ruse of a cocktail-making class. There was one problem: Chris, exhausted from jet lag, nearly refused to get out of bed. “I was like, ‘Go without me, mate.’” With some prodding, they made it upstairs and ended the night as fiancés.
La Dolce Vita
To honor Chris’s Greek heritage and Andrew’s Italian roots, they initially considered both homelands for the wedding. While many of their loved ones were already familiar with Athens, Lake Como offered guests novel scenery. “We thought having our family and friends travel to such a beautiful location would be something they’d never experience again in their lives,” says Andrew, a project director at a design and construction firm.
They found Villa Erba, a 19th-century estate on the western shore of the lake, through their planner, Georgia Gravanis Smith of Mrs Smith Weddings. The night before the wedding, the couple hosted a welcome dinner at Villa d’Este, the legendary 16th-century hotel on the lake where they were staying. Securing exclusive venues meant guests could celebrate intimately, with no outside intrusion — except for a certain celebrity’s helicopter. “We woke up at
“WE WOKE UP AT VILLA D’ESTE ON THE MORNING OF THE WEDDING, AND OUR IMMEDIATE NEIGHBOR WAS KOURTNEY KARDASHIAN.”
Villa d’Este on the morning of the wedding, and our immediate neighbor was Kourtney Kardashian,” Chris says.
Center Stage
The elaborate villa allowed a light hand for décor. Globe-shaped floral arrangements mirrored the estate’s manicured hedgerows, while candelabras lent the evening an old-world flicker. “We fell in love with the venue,” says Chris, a barrister specializing in planning and environment. “So we thought, let’s just accessorize it.”
Even a sweltering summer day — compounded by black tie attire and no air conditioning — couldn’t dim the festivities.
(Personalized handheld fans helped.) Their coordinating suits, cream Loro Piana dinner jackets, tailored by Belance and paired with black trousers, nodded to the Italian setting. Andrew’s featured a scalloped cutout on one lapel, while Chris’s took a more classic approach.
Since the venue provided an exquisite backdrop as-is, the couple invested in moments, beginning with their arrival by boat. As guests gathered in the late afternoon, roaming performers in sculptural headpieces played violin across the grounds. Then came the lakeside ceremony, sealed with a kiss and a burst of daytime fireworks — “a bit of theater,” as Andrew puts it, that sur-
The Honeymooners
AFTER EXCHANGING VOWS ON THE SHORES OF LAKE COMO, CHRIS AND ANDREW EMBARKED ON A SIX-WEEK HONEYMOON ACROSS EIGHT DESTINATIONS.
01: Paris
Cour des Vosges, Evok Collection: A discreet hôtel particulier tucked into the most romantic square in the city.
02: London
The Beaumont, Mayfair: An Art Deco landmark in the heart of one of the world’s most beloved neighborhoods.
03: St. Tropez
La Mandarine: A Provençal garden retreat just steps from the Place des Lices.
04: Nice
Le Negresco: The grande dame of the Côte d’Azur, a Belle Époque icon overlooking the Promenade des Anglais.
05: Mykonos
Aeonic Suites & Spa: An intimate clifftop retreat on the Aegean.
06: Athens
Four Seasons Astir Palace: A storied resort on a pine-covered peninsula, with the Aegean at its feet.
07: Lake Como
Villa d’Este: The exclusive five-star retreat where Chris and Andrew stayed throughout their wedding activities.
08: Mallorca
La Residencia, A Belmond Hotel: A hilltop retreat in the medieval village of Sóller, with private pools and mountain views.
“BUT
A SLOW FIRST DANCE INTO PARTY, PARTY, PARTY THAT’S JUST
NOT US.”
prised guests into delightful screams. The one downside? The couple didn’t see the fireworks themselves, as they were too busy holding their first kiss as husbands to ensure the photographer captured the moment.
Dinner unfolded across two long banquet tables. “It’s Italy, so we knew the food was going to be exceptional,” says Andrew. The meal was punctuated by an opera singer serenading the room, along with heartfelt speeches from family and friends. Then, instead of a traditional first dance, the couple made a high-energy entrance to the afterparty by descending the grand staircase as performers in mirror-ball outfits held disco balls aloft on plinths, to a remix of Sam Smith’s “Unholy.” “It was unconventional,” Andrew admits. “But a slow first dance into party, party, party — that’s just not us.”
After the party wrapped, guests regrouped the next day for a casual beach hang — or “recovery day,” as Chris and Andrew called it. They also flew home with custom silk scarves printed with illustrations of the venue, a keepsake the couple still spots friends wearing more than a year later.
A Word to the Wise
Now back home in Sydney, half a world away from their Italian wedding setting, the grooms offer two pieces of advice for anyone considering a destination wedding: hire a planner and choose a location so singular it makes a long flight worth it. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m in a nice hotel,’” says Chris. “There was a wow factor.”
As for the day itself, the couple recommends taking photos early so you maximize quality time with guests. “Rather than spending it tucked away somewhere, take advantage of every moment so that you can spend the best day of your life with your loved ones,” says Chris.
Venue: Villa Erba
Planner: Mrs Smith Weddings
Cinematographer: Soda Films
Florist: Ratti Flora
Catering: Sun Lake Catering
Grooming: BLB Management
Officiant: Como Lake Celebrant Entertainment: Blu Notte Eventi
DJ: Thodoris Kokkalis
Rentals: Sofi Design
Stationery: Mazii Collection
Grooms’ suits: Belance
Wedding bands: Cartier
P E A R L S P A S S I O N
F O R
A WEDDING MAINSTAY, PEARLS ARE MORE POPULAR—AND VARIED—THAN EVER. IF YOU KNOW HOW TO APPRAISE AND SHOP FOR THEM, THE WORLD’S YOUR OYSTER.
STORY BY LESLIE GARISTO PFAFF
P“Pearls,” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis famously remarked, “are always appropriate”—and, she might have added, never more so than when it comes to weddings. Pearls have graced the throats of brides for millennia, ever since the ancient Greeks embraced them as emblems of love and marriage.
Somewhat more recently, they’ve been the favored wedding accessories of celebrated brides from Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth II, and actress-turned-princess Grace Kelly to modern royals like Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle to pop culture royalty including Emma Stone, Jennifer Lopez, and Ariana Grande. Diamonds may sparkle, but pearls glow, as if inhabited by some otherworldly light.
That glow, known in the trade as luster, derives from pearls’ unlikely origin in a gritty biological process: When a mollusk like an oyster is invaded by a shell fragment or some other irritant, it secretes layer after layer of a substance called nacre to protect itself. And so, a process that begins in the gland of a bivalve yields a gem that, until about 1920, was one of the rarest—and costliest—in the world.
Enter Kokichi Mikimoto, a Japanese entrepreneur, who in the early days of the 20th century developed a process for farming—or “culturing”—pearls. By seeding an oyster with a small, rounded bead made from a freshwater mussel shell, he was able to jump-start the oyster’s production of nacre to create, over time, a pearl that looked exactly like those produced in nature. In fact, says Reema Farooqi, executive director
of the Pearl Association of America, “to tell whether a pearl is cultured, you’d need an Xray machine to see if there’s a bead inside it.” Prized for their rarity, natural pearls tend to be far more expensive than cultured. In fact, notes Kentaro Nishimura, president and CEO of Mikimoto America (the company founded by Kokichi Mikimoto), “natural pearls are primarily found in museum collections and among specialized collectors.”
Today, the vast majority of pearls sold— including those purchased by brides (and occasionally, by grooms)—are cultured. According to Ruby Autore, founder of the Australian pearl house Autore Moda, their popularity as a bridal accessory is actually growing. “Pearls have evolved from something purely traditional,” she says, “into something effortlessly modern and deeply personal.” In addition to the conventional string of pearls, brides are incorporating pearls as earrings, charm necklaces, hair accessories, and gown embellishments, and grooms are sporting them in brooches. “Layering and mixing styles have also become increasingly popular,” notes Nishimura. Pearls have even found their way into engagement rings, accompanying or replacing diamonds. In actress Emma Stone’s ring, for instance, an eye-poppingly large pearl is the star (or, in the parlance of the trade, the hero stone), surrounded by a supporting cast of small diamonds.
S, AS IN SHOPPING
If you plan to make pearls a part of your big day, you’ll need to be cognizant of what Autore calls the Five S’s:
The soul—or the luster—of the pearl.
It’s by far the most important factor to consider when you’re casting your net for pearls, the most lustrous of which are graded AAA or AAAA and carry a luster rating of “High to Very High.” “Luster,” says Nishimura, “defines the pearl’s beauty and depth.” You can actually see your reflection in a high-quality pearl, and the sharper the image, the more lustrous the pearl.
The surface.
You’re looking for a smooth surface, largely free of bumps and/or pits. “Pearls with fewer surface blemishes are always much more desirable than a pearl that is blemished
THE PRICE OF PEARLS
Real pearls span price points per strand from a few hundred dollars to well over a million. Generally on the lower end are freshwater pearls “You can find a lowerquality freshwater strand in the hundreds of dollars,” says Farooqi.. Higher-quality freshwater strands tend to go for $500 to $1,000, while those of the best quality sell for $1,500 and more.
A strand of small akoya pearls will likely fetch between $300 and $500; strands composed of 7- to 8-mm pearls, on the other hand, will cost you $800 to $2,000, and a strand of 8.5- to 9-mm akoyas is likely to go for $3,000 to $6,000. Expect strands of even larger akoyas to fetch $5,000 to $10,000 and up.
Tahitian pearls tend to be slightly more expensive than akoyas. You can get a lower-quality strand for several hundred dollars, but those of higher quality can range from $1,500 to $3,000, with bestquality examples usually running from $10,000 to $20,000.
South Sea pearls are, in general, the costliest among the four pearl categories. Autore notes that “high-quality South Sea pearl jewelry can range from $300 to well over $300,000.” Expect to pay between $1,500 and $30,000 (and up) for a strand of 9- to 15-mm South Sea pearls and even more for those with a golden hue.
Got your heart set on natural pearls? Plan to dig deep: The least valuable strand will cost you about $10,000, and top-quality natural pearls can set you back millions.
Whatever your final choice, keep in mind, Autore advises, that “a bridal pearl piece is often an investment—something you’ll wear far beyond your wedding day.”
because blemishes make the pearl duller,” notes Farooqi.
The shape.
“A perfectly round shape is rare,” says Autore, but the rounder the pearl, the more desirable it is—with a caveat. So-called baroque pearls, with their unique, organic shapes, are becoming increasingly popular.
The size.
Large pearls are having their day, and all things being equal, the largest pearls will command the highest prices, with a caveat: “A perfectly proportioned, luminous pearl can be more desirable than a larger but less radiant one,” says Nishimura.
Shade.
Say “pearl,” and most people think white. But in fact, pearls come in a dazzling variety of colors, including pink, gold, and black.
“Color is always a personal preference,” says Farooqi, who nevertheless notes that most brides choose white pearls or white with a pink overtone. In fact, the latter are more valuable than purely white pearls; you’ll find them marketed under names like Rosé and Rosé Premium.
And then there’s craftsmanship.
If you’re buying strands or earrings, you’ll want to see how well the pearls match, advises Nishimura.
DIVING DEEPER
Pearls are also classified according to their place of origin. Most broadly, they’re either freshwater or saltwater. The majority of freshwater pearls—which are usually cultured in mussels as opposed to oysters—are developed in the lakes and rivers of China, though some are farmed in the U.S. and Japan. They’re often less rounded than saltwater pearls, but unlike the latter, they’re frequently valued for their irregular shapes.
A relatively new freshwater product, known as Edison pearls, come in an unprecedented variety of metallic colors, including deep purple, baby pink, peach, and copper. Among the saltwater pearls there are three distinct categories:
Akoya:
That perfect pearl you see when you close your eyes? It’s probably an akoya: “It’s round, it’s white, it’s lustrous; it has beautiful nacre,” says Farooqi. Akoyas include those bridefavored white pearls with pink overtones.
South Sea:
These pearls are cultured in and around the South China Sea, in northern Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and parts of Myanmar. “The rarest and most luxurious of cultured pearls,” says Autore, “they’re known for their large size and rich luster and represent the pinnacle of pearl craftsmanship.” South Sea pearls come in shades of white and gold.
Tahitian:
Farmed predominantly in French Polynesia, Tahitian pearls are naturally dark, with striking overtones in shades of green, peacock, and dark purple.
While most of the saltwater pearls you’ll find in jewelry stores had their start in an oyster, many mollusks produce pearls, and some of them are quite sought-after, though, as Nishimura notes, “they’re non-nacreous, often displaying flamelike structures or iridescent colors.” Conch pearls, for instance, are loved for their range of pinks. Clam pearls, which can either be round or organically shaped, have the look of porcelain; inside each of them is a small flame pattern that moves when the light hits it, like a star sapphire. And the most valuable pearl of all doesn’t hail from an oyster but from a black and white sea snail in an orange shell known as the melo melo. Its large, round pearls, the most desirable of which are a deep orange, take decades to grow, and if you were inclined to go diving for one, odds are you’d have to look through several thousand melo melos before hitting the jackpot.
Conch, clam, and melo melo pearls occur naturally, meaning they’re incredibly rare. But what they share with all pearls is their transformation, through a natural act of self-protection, into a small but glorious miracle of nature.
DENTAL DETECTION
It’s a long-held story that you can tell a real pearl from a fake by rubbing it against your teeth. A fake, in theory, will feel smooth, while the real thing will, ironically, feel rough against your teeth. In fact, the story’s true—though you’d be better o shopping for pearls at a reputable jeweler than putting them in your mouth.
Akoya cultured pearl and diamond bow charm necklace; $13,000
Kay Jewelers
Cultured pearl & diamond accent necklace; $1,299
Hueb Diamond and pearl gold drop earrings;
$9,800
Presley Oldham “Frost” Freshwater cultured pearl earrings; $350
Co.
Ti any &
HardWear link bracelet in yellow gold with freshwater pearls; $6,800
Mikimoto
ON BLUE STALLION FARM, BRIDE SHANA COHEN AND GROOM ADI TSHNIEDER — ALONG WITH MOTHER-OF-THE-BRIDE, GANY LALO — TURNED THEIR FLORIDA BACKYARD INTO A WEDDING VENUE, BUILDING NEARLY EVERY ELEMENT BY HAND.
HOME
STORY BY MEGAN McCARTY
PHOTOGRAPHY BY RIKKI SNYDER PHOTOGRAPHY AND OSIRIS PHOTO & FILM
HHome is where the heart is — and where Shana Cohen and Adi Tshnieder’s love story begins. Adi, a Texas native and old friend of Shana’s brother, was visiting Miami when pandemic travel restrictions grounded him indefinitely. A mutual friend nudged him toward Shana’s warm family, who welcomed Adi in for the holidays. He never left.
“He’s a big fisherman and I’m a horse girl,” says Shana, “so he seamlessly fit into my family, the farm, and the lifestyle.” That farm is Blue Stallion Farm, a lush property in Southwest Ranches, Florida, that Shana’s mother, lifestyle expert Gany Lalo, has cultivated into both a family home and a collection of home and bath products. (The family, including father Jimmie Bernal, also owns the watch brand Invicta.) The farm became the backdrop for Shana and Adi’s relationship, from courtship to proposal to wedding day.
When it came time to plan the “I do’s,” the challenge wasn’t choosing the venue, but reimagining it.
Building Something Beautiful
Forget traditional wedding planning. Instead, the family launched a full-scale creative project. With Gany’s design vision, Shana’s instinct for authenticity, and Jimmie’s hands-on carpentry skills, they transformed Blue Stallion Farm into a venue that could comfortably host 250 guests without sacrificing its handcrafted charm.
“The aesthetic was to create the wedding within the nature and landscape of the farm — nothing staged or added,” says Gany. Whatever the family could build themselves, they did. In his workshop, Jimmie hand-turned the wooden posts for the chuppah (which Shana has since brought home to convert into a pergola) and constructed a deck with custom doors to conceal the restroom trailers. Their parking lot was converted into a copper-walled reception area layered with plants, while a stone walkway, now a permanent upgrade for the property, was laid as a ceremony aisle.
RAISE A GLASS
The couple and their guests sipped on signature cocktails from The Farmhouse Happy Hour book from Blue Stallion Farm.
Cucumber Canopy
Cooling and full of bright garden flavors, the Cucumber Canopy layers fresh cucumber, zesty lemon, and a hint of elderflower with smooth gin and sparkling water for a vibrant drink that feels like a breath of fresh farm air.
GATHER
3 oz dry gin (or substitute vodka, or Seedlip Garden for non-alcoholic)
1 English cucumber (or Turkish/Persian cucumbers)
2 oz fresh lemon juice
1 oz St. Germain (elderflower liqueur, optional)
¼–1 oz simple syrup or honey syrup (start with less and adjust to taste)
3–4 oz sparkling water or soda water
Optional garnishes: thin cucumber ribbons, fresh mint sprigs, white jasmine blossoms
MAKE IT
1. Prepare the Garnish Using a mandolin or vegetable peeler, slice long, thin cucumber ribbons. Set one aside per glass.
2. Muddle & Shake Add ¼ cup cucumber slices (from leftover scraps) to a cocktail shaker with the gin. Muddle until the cucumber releases its juice. Add lemon juice, St. Germain, simple syrup, and a handful of ice. Shake vigorously until well chilled.
3. Assemble the Glasses Line each glass with a cucumber ribbon and fill with ice. Strain the cocktail evenly between glasses.
4. Top & Garnish Add a splash (1–2 oz) of sparkling water to each glass. Finish with extra cucumber, fresh mint, or a jasmine blossom if you like.
Florals followed the same philosophy, designed to blend into the landscape. “We wanted the farm to look like it does every day, just dressed a little bit more for a formal occasion,” Shana says.
Welcome Home
With no backup tent, the family needed Mother Nature — and a little luck — on their side. They chose February 15, timed for Florida’s lowest risk of rain and a long
Presidents’ Day weekend to ease travel for out-of-town guests. For extra insurance, the couple buried a whiskey bottle upside down on the property, a tradition said to ward off rain. It worked.
Guests arrived at 2:00 p.m., winding through the farm’s canopy of banyan trees. The early start was intentional, giving guests time to wander the property, visit the ducks paddling on the pond, and admire Shana’s beloved horses before the ceremony.
Behind the scenes, Shana and her family were putting finishing touches on the tables, styling them with antiques and personal heirlooms, all while still in their pajamas, with hair in rollers and dogs underfoot. “Shana wanted it authentic, how we are,” Gany laughs.
The ceremony unfolded at the water’s edge. They skipped a first look, so Adi saw his bride for the first time walking down the new stone path, though Shana snuck a peek from the kitchen window. Shana wore a strapless gown with delicate floral appliques, which she found on the first day dress shopping. “I put it on and felt like me,” she says. “Every other dress felt like a costume.”
Rose bushes flanked the aisle, and in a moment bound to be retold for years to come, one caught her veil midstride, sending a branch snapping back to puncture her nose. Gany discreetly gestured from the sidelines; Shana didn’t know she was bleeding.
Celebrate Good Times
After the ceremony, the couple slipped away for a few private minutes — a Jewish tradition before joining guests in the reimagined reception space, arranged with a mix of formal and lounge seating.
In lieu of a sit-down dinner, passed bites and buffet stations allowed guests to eat, explore, and connect at their own pace. “People were taking their plates to the barn to go meet the horses. The older guests could sit at a table. The kids were on the dance floor. It just flowed,” Shana says.
Loved ones cheered the happy couple with three signature drinks: Shana’s spicy passion fruit margarita, Adi’s extra dirty olive martini, and a cucumber refresher named for the family dog, Olive. As the sun set, the mother-daughter dance to “Slipping Through My Fingers” from Mamma Mia became one of the day’s most emotional moments, joined by Shana’s three siblings. “There wasn’t a dry eye,” Gany says.
At 2:00 a.m., the dance floor was still full.
“It’s really about how the wedding made you feel more than what it looked like,” Gany says. “We wanted to create an energy and a feeling that you can’t replicate.”
The newlyweds are planning a Patagonia honeymoon filled with horseback riding and fly fishing, naturally. In the meantime, they live five minutes from the farm, in a home with two horse stalls so Shana can live out her ultimate horse girl dream: to ride over to her mother’s house.
Florist: John James Designs
Catering: Nathalie’s Catering Kippot: Kippot World
STORY BY CORINNE PIERRE-LOUIS
THE & OF Master Movement, Light,
Lace
AFTER NEARLY THREE DECADES IN BRIDAL FASHION, REEM ACRA REFLECTS ON TIMELESSNESS AND THE PHILOSOPHY THAT CONTINUES TO DEFINE HER ICONIC BRIDAL HOUSE.
MMost founders prefer to trace their success back to strategy: the late nights, the perfect timing, and the relentless hustle that turns an idea into a business. Reem Acra tells a different story. Ask how she built one of bridal fashion’s most recognizable luxury houses, and her answer is far less calculated.
“It was destiny,” she says pointedly. “None of it was really planned.”
Born and raised in Beirut, Acra grew up with an innate appreciation for elegance and fashion. Her upbringing, paired with a global design education spanning New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and Paris’s École Supérieure des Arts et Techniques de la Mode, helped shape the aesthetic that would later define her collections. “I think my background had a lot to do with my style,” she explains. Yet, the launch of her namesake brand was almost accidental.
In 1997, Acra designed a gown for a friend’s society wedding, and at a time when bridal fashion leaned traditional and predictable, her creation broke the mold. It featured intricate, handmade floral embellishments, which caught the attention of The New York Times, instantly altering the trajectory of her career.
What followed was less of an intentional pivot into the wedding industry and more of a realization that she had a point of view the market lacked, coupled with a desire to fill that gap. “Bridal did not have what I call ‘regal and emotional’,” she says. “I brought to the market something that was unique and special.”
But frankly, that’s an understatement. Acra created gowns with a strong sense of personality through complex embroidery, figure-flattering silhouettes, and couturelevel detailing. Her designs offered brides an escape from tradition, leaning instead into pieces that felt deeply personal and luxurious. Retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue and Kleinfeld Bridal quickly took notice, and the
Reem Acra name quickly became synonymous with high-glamour dressing.
The momentum inevitably carried over into her eveningwear and ready-to-wear lines, which she launched in 2003, and Acra’s distinctive DNA translated seamlessly to the red carpet. Her clientele even grew to include some of the world’s most recognizable women, including Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry, and Madonna, among others. Whether it was a crystal-embroidered column gown on a red carpet, a sharply draped off-the-shoulder silhouette at an awards show, or a dramatic ball gown built for stage performance, her ensembles appealed to women who understood the power of entrance-making fashion.
Perhaps the most impressive feat, however, is Acra’s consistency. After decades in the industry, she has remained remarkably steady in her point of view, even as fashion and bridal continue to shift tremendously. No small feat in today’s trend-driven, digitalfirst world, where people are constantly exposed to runway shows, celebrity weddings, Pinterest boards, TikTok advice, and endless Instagram reels telling them what to wear.
The designer is fully aware of that shift, too. Social media has changed the world and has become an essential part of the industry, she acknowledges—but that hasn’t dictated the brand. Instead, she remains grounded in the art of creating beautiful garments for women. “I have extensive experience in the bridal world,” she says. “I love working with brides and guiding them on what they should wear on their wedding day.” Adding, “I think I contributed my aesthetic to the industry, and hope that individuality becomes more and more important.” That desire for individuality feels especially crucial today.
When asked what lies ahead for a brand that has already stood the test of time, Acra views the future not as a need for reinvention, but as a continuation of her legacy. “I love being me,” she says simply, “and happy to keep creating in many different formats.”
Ultimately, that commitment to authenticity defines the brand. After nearly three decades, Reem Acra proves that staying true to an uncompromising vision matters far more than chasing mass appeal—and that is exactly why her work endures.
and UPAWAY
THEY MAY BE YOUNG, BUT BIANCA HALL AND ERICA VANCO OF ESTERA EVENTS HAVE EARNED A REPUTATION AS TWO OF THE COUNTRY’S TOP ULTRA-LUXURY DESTINATIONWEDDING PLANNERS.
STORY
BY
LESLIE GARISTO PFAFF
IT’S
It’s not your traditional Cinderella story, but it does culminate in a wedding—hundreds of them, in fact. It begins in Chicago in 2010, with two young interns working in exchange for experience at an event-planning company and ends with those interns, nine years later, buying the company and transforming it into one of the country’s most successful luxury event- and wedding-planning firms, with nary a singing mouse in the wings to help them work their magic.
Bianca Hall was a college sophomore studying business when she took the internship at Estera Events. At around the same time, Erica Vanco was working as a server at a restaurant in Lincoln Park, trying to build a career in the hospitality industry, when a coworker tipped her off about an internship opening up at Estera. “Fast-forward two weeks, and Bianca was interviewing me for the internship,” she says. Looking back, she sees their meeting that day as “all very cosmic.”
As they learned the business together, she and Hall certainly seemed to be aiming for the stars. Their trajectory within the company was rapid and upward: After a year, they were green-lighted to work directly with clients, and Hall remembers worrying that those clients would confuse her youth with inexperience. “We’d set up an in-person meeting, and I’d have to get there early to order a tonic water because I didn’t want the client to know that I wasn’t old enough to drink,” she says. By the time they bought the company in 2019, they were both of legal age. More important, they’d already taken over much of Estera’s day-today operations.
They had just enough time to fulfill their shared goal of shifting into the ultra-luxury
market when world events intervened to change the course of the business. Early in 2020, Covid closed down virtually every public and private venue in and around Chicago. “Okay,” Hall remembers telling Vanco, “we just purchased an event-planning company, and now events can no longer happen.”
In fact, they could, but not in Chicago. Many of their clients moved their weddings to Florida and other states where Covid regulations were more relaxed—“and they brought us with them,” says Hall. Suddenly, they were making a name as planners of destination weddings, and they loved it. “Every time we got on a plane, we were like, ‘This is what we want to do,’” Hall recalls.
Today, they’re known around the world for their destination weddings, orchestrating lavish events in locales from Mexico and the Caribbean to Italy and the U.K. They’ve pulled off wildly romantic weddings in the arid expanses of the Utah desert and on the white sands of a windblown beach in Curacao. While many wedding planners view destination weddings as a kind of necessary evil—plagued, they complain, by a surfeit of moving parts, unfamiliar vendors, long flights, and hostile customs officials—the Estera partners see them, Hall says, as “an added challenge that we love.” “They provide an added element of adventure for the couples and the guests,” Vanco says, and Hall notes that working on so many destination weddings supercharges the pair’s creativity: “When you aren’t working in the same place week after week, you’re really able to look at what you do with fresh eyes.”
Those fresh eyes have overseen some remarkable creations. For a wedding in Palm Springs, Vanco and Hall draped the outside of a tent with swoops and whorls of dazzling
yellow fabric. “That one people really loved,” says Hall. For the beachside wedding in Curacao, they used mirrors and Lucite to create an aisle and pergola that seemed to be spun out of sea and sand. And a wedding in Chicago featured a hidden jazz club, its old-time-movie ambience enhanced by the mist from a fog machine.
They’ve set weddings in forests and at lakefronts, atop mountains and on the grounds of grand estates. But one of their most memorable events was actually held in their native Chicago, though at a very untraditional wedding venue: Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. Small details echoed the surroundings. To determine where they’d be seated, for instance, guests had to take part in an archeological “dig,” sweeping through sand to excavate their table numbers.
Estera’s designs may be wildly imaginative, but they begin with a set of simple questions to determine what couples want out of their big day (something the couples themselves don’t always know): Not just “What are your favorite colors?” and “Which flowers do you like?” but also “Where do you shop for your home?” “Where do you love to travel?” “Is there a specific restaurant that you love, and if so, why do you love it?” “The whole point of designing these weddings is that they be reflective of the couple and that the guests experience the event feeling as if it was truly honoring that couple,” says Hall. In fact, the guest experience is one of the most critical considerations for the pair, and that’s especially challenging at a destination wedding. “When people go to a destination wedding,” says Hall, “they’re there for three full days, and the wedding itself is six hours, so it’s what’s happening during the time outside the wedding that really creates the energy leading up to it.” That means, among other things, planning a variety of excursions to keep guests entertained and happy. At that desert wedding in Utah, for example, guests could book a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon, an afternoon of kayaking and stand-up paddle boarding, a hot-air balloon ride, a private boat tour of Lake Powell, or a slot-canyon tour led by a Navajo guide.
Of course, destination weddings present
Estera’s
Favorite Destinations
VILLA BALBIANO
Lake Como, Italy
There are few spots more romantic than Lake Como, its glistening waters backed by a series of rolling, verdant mountains. And on the lake, there are few venues as spectacular as Balbiano, a 16th-century palazzo lavishly decorated with period artwork and furnishings.
HACIENDA ALTAGRACIA
Santa Teresa, Costa Rica
Set above the cloud line, this hotel and spa spans 180 acres of tropical forest, equine stables, and a working coffee farm, offering sweeping mountain views set to dawn-to-dusk birdsong.
ROSEWOOD MAYAKOBA
Playa del Carmen, Mexico
Set among a labyrinth of emerald lagoons on Mexico’s Riviera Maya, this resort in the luxury Rosewood chain affords couples the opportunity to celebrate on the white sands of its Caribbean beachfront.
AMANGIRI
Canyon Point, Utah
Sinuous pools, heart-stopping views of Utah’s red rock country, and a sleek modern hotel anchoring it all make Amangiri the perfect place to make indelible memories.
THE LYRIC OPERA
Chicago, Illinois
For nuptials on a grand scale, this working opera house (yes, you can rent it) is a classic. Built in 1929 and meticulously restored in 1996, the venue is rich in architectural details and history. During a hush in your celebration, you just might hear an echo of Luciano Pavarotti, who performed here 56 times.
other challenges as well, not the least of which is working with unfamiliar vendors, the folks who provide food, flowers, photographs, and the all-important wedding cake, among other essentials. Hall and Vanco easily rise to that challenge because, unlike many other wedding planners, they don’t have a list of preferred vendors they use again and again. That means that they’ve built in the time in their planning schedule to interview new vendors for each event, whether it’s held at home in Chicago or at a stately home outside London, to make sure, says Hall, “that those vendors will be a
perfect fit for each particular couple.”
It also helps that both Vanco and Hall are inveterate travelers, so they’re likely familiar with most of the destinations their clients ask for, and ready to make suggestions if their clients don’t have a specific destination in mind. On a personal level, both women admit they share a special fondness for Italy, in part because they’re both of Italian extraction. Vanco, who’s part first-generation Mexican and part secondgeneration Italian, says that her family “is still deeply rooted in our culture in Italy, so traveling there is really special.”
Hall’s family is from Tuscany, a region she’s been obsessed with since seeing the film Under the Tuscan Sun as a girl. “Oh my gosh,” she says, “we have to do a wedding there because it would be full circle.” In fact, their hope is to have a stronger presence in Italy in the future—“something that we’re
moving toward,” says Hall. They’ve already worked on weddings in Ravello and Lake Como, the latter Vanco’s favorite destination for her personal and family travels.
While they both bring their passion for travel to play when planning a destination wedding, they tend to divide up their roles
according to their personal strengths. Hall, a self-described people person and good listener, is head of client relations, and her role is to ensure that the couples and their guests have all their questions answered and all their needs met, whether that’s help in booking a flight or menu assistance for guests with dietary restrictions.
Vanco is head of production, in charge of sourcing and managing vendors as well as overseeing the innumerable details involved in a luxury wedding, destination or otherwise, from timelines to floor plans. “I’m a very detailed color-coded Excel nerd,” she explains.
They come together to work on the creative end, though Hall admits she sometimes gets carried away and Vanco has to ground her. “I’m like, oh my God, we’ve got to do this,’ this huge dream of a plan, and Erica is like, ‘Girl. It’s a great idea. But this is how we actually need to execute it.’”
They also come together on the day of the wedding, though they make sure to hire a sufficient number of assistants to ensure that nothing is left to luck. Some of those assistants travel with them to destination weddings and some are hired locally. Less organized souls might be daunted by the demands of running a large wedding in an exotic locale, but Vanco and Hall both find it a positive challenge. “It’s never a boring day,” says Vanco.
They love wedding planning in general, Vanco explains, “because we get to work with all these different people from all these different backgrounds, and they’re telling us their love stories, and we’re so honored not only to hear their stories but to be a part of them.” Hall is moved by the ephemeral nature of what she does, as well as its permanent effect: “I love creating these temporary moments, like these beautiful installations, just for a day, to help people create a memory they’re not going to forget. It’s an honor to do something like that for someone. It’s not something we take lightly.”
SPECIAL SECTION
Caribbean Calling
The Caribbean remains a quintessential escape for discerning travelers, where turquoise waters meet powder-soft sands and life moves to a rhythm shaped by sun, sea, and culture. Across the islands, each destination o ers its own expression of barefoot luxury and re ned ease.
Days unfold in private villa hideaways, in nity pools overlooking endless horizons, and yacht charters tracing coral reefs alive with color and life. The allure of the Caribbean Sea lies not only in its natural beauty but in its e ortless hospitality, where luxury feels unhurried and deeply personal.
From sunrise casting gold across calm waters to sunset fading over crystalline coves, the Caribbean leaves a lasting impression—an enduring invitation to return again and again. It is where luxury nds its most natural expression for modern travelers everywhere.
-THE EDITORS
Nassau & Paradise Island
Planning a destination wedding can feel overwhelming, but Nassau & Paradise Island in The Bahamas o er an unmatched combination of natural beauty, luxury, culture, and convenience that set it apart from many other Caribbean destinations.
With white sand beaches, crystal-clear turquoise waters, world-class resorts, and experienced wedding planners, the islands create the perfect backdrop for couples seeking a romantic yet elevated wedding experience.
One of the biggest advantages of Nassau & Paradise Island is the variety of experiences available not only for the couple, but also for wedding guests. While many Caribbean islands are known primarily for beaches and relaxation, Nassau & Paradise Island o er a vibrant mix of entertainment, history, dining, history and culture. Guests can enjoy their vacation beyond the wedding festivities, making the entire celebration feel like a luxury getaway.
The destination is especially known for its high-end culinary scene. Couples and guests can enjoy celebrity chef dining experiences from renowned restaurants throughout the islands, o ering everything from ne seafood and steak to authentic Bahamian cuisine. This gives wedding weekends a sophisticated, upscale feel while allowing visitors to explore di erent dining experiences throughout their stay. Welcome
dinners, rehearsal parties, and post-wedding brunches become memorable events on their own.
Nassau & Paradise Island also stand out for its rich culture and history. Guests can explore local art museums, galleries, and historic landmarks that showcase the vibrant spirit of The Bahamas. Attractions such as the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, colourful downtown Nassau, Junkanoo-inspired art, and colonial architecture provide meaningful cultural experiences that many resort-only islands cannot o er. Wedding guests can immerse themselves in the local atmosphere while learning about Bahamian traditions, music, and artistry.
For couples wanting stunning wedding photos and unforgettable ceremony locations, Nassau & Paradise Island o er incredible versatility. Couples can choose from elegant beachfront ceremonies, luxurious oceanfront resorts, private gardens, rooftop terraces, or sophisticated ballrooms. The scenery naturally creates a romantic atmosphere, minimizing the need for excessive décor while still delivering a luxurious aesthetic.
Another major advantage is accessibility. Nassau is one of the most convenient Caribbean destinations to reach, with direct ights from many major U.S. cities and international hubs. This makes travel easier and often more a ordable for guests compared to more remote islands that require multiple connecting ights or ferries. The convenience encourages more friends and family members to attend while reducing travel stress.
Many resorts on Nassau & Paradise Island also provide dedicated wedding coordinators and customizable wedding packages that simplify planning. From owers and catering to music and excursions, couples can rely on experienced professionals to handle details e ciently. Guests can enjoy activities such as snorkelling, boating, spa treatments, shopping, golf, casinos and nightlife, and cultural tours throughout the wedding weekend, creating a multi-day celebration rather than a single event.
Perhaps most importantly, Nassau & Paradise Island o er the perfect balance between relaxation and excitement. Couples can enjoy a peaceful tropical honeymoon immediately after the wedding while still having access to vibrant entertainment, ne dining, and cultural attractions. This unique blend of luxury, accessibility, and authentic Bahamian experiences makes Nassau & Paradise Island stand out as one of the Caribbean’s premier destination wedding locations for both couples and their guests.
LOSE YOURSELVESFIND FOREVER &
Wander hand in hand along turquoise waters & white shimmering shorelines. Toast to forever at candlelit beachfront dinners & celebrate each moment in e ortless island luxury. Share stolen sunsets & dance to vibrant Bahamian rhythms. Your dream wedding escape is more than you imagined & closer than you think.
ALL THIS & SO MUCH MORE AWAITS.
Every Love Story Deserves an Extraordinary Setting
The most memorable weddings aren’t defined by a single moment. They’re remembered for the experiences shared, the stories created, and the people who come together to celebrate.
At Atlantis Paradise Island, a wedding unfolds over days rather than hours, creating opportunities to connect, celebrate, and savor every moment. Set along the shores of Paradise Island in The Bahamas, Atlantis offers couples the rare chance to transform their wedding into an unforgettable destination experience for everyone involved.
Imagine arriving with your closest family and friends and stepping into a world where
azure waters stretch to the horizon and every day feels touched by possibility. Here, mornings begin with ocean views and anticipation, afternoons invite discovery and adventure, and evenings unfold beneath painted Bahamian skies.
When the celebration begins, the setting feels almost dreamlike. Exchange vows with the sound of gentle waves in the background, gather loved ones on a pristine stretch of white sand as the sun
your backdrop. Whether intimate or grand, every celebration feels deeply personal and effortlessly beautiful.
The moments surrounding the wedding are often the ones guests remember most. A welcome gathering overlooking the water. A rehearsal dinner filled with laughter and anticipation. A reception where candlelight, music, and the warm island breeze carry the celebration late into the evening. A farewell brunch where family and friends linger just a little longer, not quite ready for the weekend to end.
Food plays an important role in every celebration, and Atlantis offers countless ways to bring people together around the table. From elegant receptions and chef-driven dining experiences to relaxed waterfront gatherings, every meal becomes an opportunity to celebrate, connect, and create lasting memories.
Beyond the wedding itself, Atlantis invites guests to embrace all that Paradise Island has to offer. Days can be spent unwinding on white-sand beaches, indulging in spa experiences, discovering marine life, or simply enjoying time together in one of the Caribbean’s most iconic destinations. The result is a wedding that feels less like an event and more like a shared escape.
Behind every celebration is a dedicated team focused on bringing each couple’s vision to life. From the earliest planning conversations to the final farewell, Atlantis wedding specialists thoughtfully coordinate every detail, allowing couples to be fully present for the moments that matter most.
Because some love stories deserve more than a day.
They deserve a destination where every moment becomes part of the celebration.
Jamaica Inn
Some places understand love. Jamaica Inn — perched on a secluded beach on the shimmering north coast of Jamaica — has been that place for nearly 70 years. Hollywood legends, royalty, and heads of state have all retreated here, drawn by the same quiet promise: that on these shores, the world slows down and the people you love come into sharper focus.
For couples planning an intimate destination wedding in Jamaica, Jamaica Inn o ers three elegant open-air venues - from the West Wing Lawn with sweeping Caribbean Sea views, to 700ft of secluded beach, or the storied croquet lawn framed by swaying palms. Ceremonies of up to 20 guests feel both e ortlessly re ned and deeply personal, held at sunset with the trade winds as witness.
The Elope in Paradise package takes care of every detail - from your dedicated wedding coordinator and minister to photographer, orals, and cake - allowing you to simply arrive, exhale, and begin.
Honeymooners nd that Jamaica Inn
rewards those who linger. Mornings begin with breakfast on your private verandah. Afternoons drift into Afternoon Tea, spa treatments, and the unhurried rhythm of the sea. This is a luxury honeymoon resort in the Caribbean designed not for spectacle, but for presence.
Proposals, vow renewals, anniversaries, and romantic escapes for two are all met with equal warmth. Whether marking a milestone or simply choosing to reconnect, this is a rare place where every moment feels quietly signi cant.
For couples seeking a romantic retreat in Jamaica with genuine heritage and timeless character, Jamaica Inn stands apart. Come for the love. Stay for the moments.
Divi & Tamarijn Aruba
With oceanfront ceremony venues, on-site wedding planning and all-inclusive accommodations, Divi & Tamarijn Aruba All Inclusives o ers couples a convenient option for celebrating life’s biggest milestones on the shores of Aruba.
Through Aruba Weddings For You, couples have access to dedicated planning services, wedding packages, guest room discounts and a variety of ceremony locations, including Aruba’s white-sand beaches. Whether hosting an intimate gathering or a larger celebration with family and friends, couples can choose from a range of options tailored to their needs.
Beyond the ceremony, guests can take advantage of the resorts’ all-inclusive o erings, including 12 dining options, eight bars, ve freshwater pools and a variety of activities such as snorkeling, guided e-bike tours, yoga classes and nightly entertainment, perfect for creating memories and keeping the celebrations going.
For honeymooners, the resorts also o er a complimentary honeymoon package featuring a preferred room location within the purchased category, a bottle of chilled champagne, a keepsake gift, turndown service, advanced rst-night dinner reserva-
tions, 15% savings at Fusion Restaurant and a complimentary night toward a return rstanniversary stay, adding extra touches to the post-wedding celebration.
Set to be unveiled in December 2026, Divi & Tamarijn Aruba All Inclusives’ new adults-only Oceanfront Junior Suites and Lanai Rooms will o er a new option for honeymooners and couples seeking additional privacy. Located in a dedicated oceanfront section of the resort, the accommodations will feature private balconies and swim-up options with personal pools and cabanas. Select room categories will also include amenities such as fully stocked mini bar, advanced dinner reservations and private airport transportation with seamless check-in.
Whether visiting for a wedding, honeymoon or couple’s getaway, Divi & Tamarijn Aruba All Inclusives combines beachfront accommodations, all-inclusive amenities and personalized planning services in one Aruba destination.
Grand Hyatt Baha Mar Nassau, Bahamas
Grand Hyatt Baha Mar o ers more than 200,000 square feet of spectacular indoor and outdoor event space, including the Baha Mar Convention, Arts & Entertainment Center, home to an impressive collection of original Bahamian artwork. From romantic beachside ceremonies and intimate poolside gatherings to elegant chapel weddings and grand receptions in the resort’s opulent Grand Ballroom, the possibilities are endless. Dedicated wedding specialists work closely with couples to thoughtfully incorporate cultural traditions and personalized details into every celebration. With venues accommodating up to 1,800 guests, Grand Hyatt Baha Mar is an ideal destination for large-scale, multicultural, and kosher weddings executed with e ortless sophistication.
To book, call 1-242-788-7339 or email bahamarweddings@hyatt.com and reference code BG26.
GRAND HYATT BAHA MAR
Make a statement with one of the most stunning wedding venues in Nassau, Bahamas at Grand Hyatt Baha Mar.
With flexible indoor and outdoor event space, we have the perfect backdrop for your big day - whether it’s a tranquil beach setting or a traditional ceremony in our waterside wedding chapel.
Our wedding and events team handle all the details to elevate your wedding, from helping you select food, beverage and vendors to delivering late-night snacks.
Personalize your day your way at Grand Hyatt Baha Mar.
TO BOOK, CALL 242-788-7339 OR EMAIL BAHAMARWEDDINGS@HYATT.COM AND MENTION CODE BG26
Where Wedding Weekends Become a Scene
At SLS Baha Mar, weddings are never just a single moment. They are a mood, a weekend, a story in motion. They begin with sun-drenched arrivals, continue with rooftop cocktails, cabana-side laughter, rehearsal dinners that turn into late-night toasts, and end with the kind of farewell guests talk about long after they leave Nassau.
Set on the turquoise edge of Cable Beach, SLS Baha Mar brings the unmistakable spirit of SLS Hotels to destination weddings in The Bahamas: glamorous, social, design-forward, and always a little unexpected. For couples who want more than a traditional celebration, the resort o ers a wedding experience that feels stylish, personal, and alive from the rst glass of champagne to the nal dance.
A wedding weekend at SLS Baha Mar can begin above it all at Skybar, the tallest rooftop bar in The Bahamas. With sweeping ocean views, golden-hour light, and an effortlessly cinematic energy, Skybar is made for welcome cocktails, bridal party gatherings, bachelor and bachelorette moments, and pre-wedding celebrations that set the tone with style.
For rehearsal dinners, bridal luncheons, and intimate pre-wedding events, Cleo Mediterranean restaurant brings warmth, avor, and an easy sense of celebration. Designed for shared plates, vibrant conversation, and memorable evenings, Cleo feels both elevated and relaxed, ideal for gathering the people who matter most before the big day.
By day, the celebration moves into the sun. Bungalow Pool, Privilege Pool, and Baha Bay Beach Club o er the perfect backdrop for bachelorette weekends, bachelor escapes, cabana parties, farewell brunches, and wedding party takeovers. Think poolside cocktails, oceanfront lounging, curated music, and the kind of e ortless glamour that feels distinctly SLS.
When it is time for the ceremony, SLS Baha Mar o ers settings that bring the des-
tination beautifully into focus. Ra ki and Ra ki Terrace provide exible indoor-outdoor spaces for ceremonies, cocktail hours, and intimate receptions, while the SLS Great Lawn creates a striking open-air stage for larger celebrations. With a permanent tent structure and capacity for up to 300 guests, the lawn is ideal for seated dinners, statement receptions, and unforgettable nights under the Bahamian sky.
Couples can also look to the rooftop pavilion for sweeping oceanfront views, creating a breathtaking setting for ceremonies, private dinners, or sunset celebrations above the shoreline. For added peace of mind, inspired weather back-up options, including gallery-style spaces such as ECCHO Museum, bring art, culture, and atmosphere into the wedding experience, while the wider Baha Mar destination adds dining, nightlife, spa time, and island ease for guests staying through the weekend, with every moment shaped to feel spontaneous, considered, glamorous, and unmistakably of the moment.
At SLS Baha Mar, every celebration moves with intention and energy. A rehearsal dinner becomes the opening act. A bachelorette weekend becomes a story of its own. A wedding becomes a full destination experience, layered with design, avor, music, scenery, and signature SLS style.
Here, couples do not simply say “I do.” They arrive, gather, celebrate, and begin their next chapter in a way that feels bold, e ortless, and entirely unforgettable, a true invitation to Savor Life’s Splendor.
WHY: Set within Tanzania’s legendary Serengeti, the Pioneer Camp o ers a glamorous return to safari’s golden age while placing guests at the heart of one of the world’s most extraordinary wildlife landscapes. The elegant tented setting delivers front-row access to sweeping plains, dramatic game drives, and unforgettable encounters with lions, elephants, and migrating herds—all paired with refined comfort and first class service.
Out of Africa Serengeti Pioneer Camp
WHEN: The camp shines year-round, but timing your stay depends on the experience you seek. From roughly January through March, the southern Serengeti comes alive with the Great Migration’s calving season, while the dry months from June to October o er exceptional wildlife viewing and dramatic predator sightings beneath clear African skies.
GOOD TO KNOW: Its location in the southern-central Serengeti places travelers within reach of prime migration routes, making early morning and sunset game drives especially rewarding. For an elevated and seamless experience, using Micato Safaris adds exceptional expertise, curated access, and polished service from arrival to final game drive.
