Katherine and Hadley are a couple from NY who chose a destination wedding in Palm Beach, FL. Typically destination weddings are small, intimate occasions but not for this popular couple who had nearly 200 people fly in for their nuptial weekend!The weekend kicked off at the Ann Norton Sculpture Garden for the Friday night Welcome Party. This venue is a gem! Not only is it the actual home of famed sculptress Ann Norton but her works are actually still there. It's an amazing backdrop for a photo shoot!
Norton's work studio
We hired private trolleys for the entire weekend to transport guests from their hotels to the parties.
This was a great venue for our Friday night event but any of you couples looking to have a smaller wedding in Florida, check out Ann Norton Sculpture Garden. It is so charming and the people who run it, the friendliest!I wish there was a way I could bottle up how gorgeous and perfect the wedding day weather was and have you all feel it. The best I can do are these slew of pictures!
See what I mean?
BORROW THIS IDEA: Pass notes to each other before the wedding! Take a moment and jot down a few words to each other just before you meet. Communication is usually limited that morning between the bride and groom so a few words can mean volumes.
The Bride's bouquet
The bridemaids' bouquets
As the rsvp yes's came in we sent out each guest a box which included a helpful weekend guide book, Palm Beach County tourist pamphlets, vouchers for Sunday brunch and a nice little palm tree to get guests in the Palm Beach state of mind.BORROW THIS IDEA: Goodie Bags in the room when guests arrive are nice and all but I like mailing out information and a small gift to guests before they arrive. I prefer this way for various reasons: 1) it's one less thing for you to do the day or so before your wedding 2) for a destination wedding it gives your guests information BEFORE they arrive so they can plan the rest of their time there and know what to expect 3) it gets people excited about the upcoming event! The cost of mailing is comparable with hotel gift bag drop off fees so why not!
Make Merry! created these flower pins and matching ring bearer "pillow" from vintage fabrics and jewelry. They went perfectly with the girl's dresses!
I love getting a copy of the day's newspaper for the couple to keep and see what was going on in the world on the day they got married. We grabbed a local PB and NY newspaper to show this couple's duel residency. (And yes, you caught me, this wedding is not that recent it was last year. In fact I'm working on their baby's christening party! )
The couple and their guests stayed at the breathtaking and historic hotel at The Breakers. What an incredible place!
Love the shot of Hadley checking out his new jewelry!
The ceremony was held at the historic St. Ann's Catholic Church in West Palm Beach. This is the oldest church in Palm Beach as well as the Church the Kennedy's attended.
If you're looking for a vintage car in S. Florida, look no further! Ragtops has them ALLLL!
The reception was held at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach. Once the home to Henry M. Flagler, the man who founded Palm Beach and is considered the father of Florida for connecting the railroads down the East Coast. Very fittingly, this home was built as a wedding gift to his wife.
BORROW THIS IDEA: Instead of a guest book, we created little notecards that had the prompt "Dear Katherine and Hadley, On your first anniversary I wish you..." Each card was dated 3/7/10 and a year later on their first anniversary the couple got to open up these notecards and read their messages!
Atelier Isabey who designed the invitations lent us their monogram file so that we could design and print the escort cards ourselves...at Kinko's!!!BORROW THIS IDEA: Since we were going to print them ourselves we thought hey why not make them as big as we want. So there's a multi-step process to how we made these. We printed the design onto nice resume paper so it would have a refined feel to it but that was obviously too flimsy to stand on it's own so glued them down to card stock and then had them cut to size.
As a surprise, on the couple's escort cards I put a sticker of a cocker spaniel that resembled their new little puppy who couldn't make the trip to Palm Beach.
We alternated rectangular tables with 2 tall candelabras and round tables with these decadent crystal lamps. Custom lilac linens with accents of BLING, from the table number frames, to the votive candle holders yet kept everything still very delicate and lady like.HELPFUL TIP: As decadent as these tables were we still managed to keep the costs down slightly by opting to do big balls of baby's breathe which have great volume at a fraction of the cost of how much an arrangement of flowers of that size would cost.
Just as we custom printed the escort cards so did we for these combo menus and place cards. At the top of each menu we printed the name of the guest.
Never have a met a groom with a bigger sweet tooth! We had this floating dessert station with just about every dessert you could imagine along with cupcakes wrapped in little choo choo train cupcake wrappers. That was our nod to the actual train in the room. After all this was the Flagler Museum, home of the founder of the Florida East Coast Railway.
Just outside the reception room there was a patio that we created an inviting lounge. So inviting that almost the entire wedding was hanging out there all night! We can't blame them though. Most of them just flew in from chilly NY and on a balmy night like that it'd be a shame to spend it inside!
We were super excited to Katherine and Hadley's wedding featured in The Knot Florida!Check out their wedding video too:
http://www.daughterofdesign.com/video-katherinehadley.html
Photos by Roey Yohai
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