Andrea and Tristan wanted a simple, urban wedding that reflected their love of their local area and each other. They chose Hobba has their venue, a super cool event space in Prahran, Melbourne, a stone’s throw from where they live. The day started with them getting ready together at their own home.
“Well first of all, we did it in 7 weeks!” began Andrea when I asked her what made their wedding different. “That is 7 weeks from our very first discussion about where, what, and how, to the actual day! We had originally told everyone we would do it at the end of 2014 (just to give them something) but then thought why wait – especially if it would make it easier to do something super low-key and non-traditional, and avoid having a year to over-plan an extravagant event. It did shock everyone to begin with, but then people told us that because we’d been saying that we were never going to get married, if we ever decided to, they thought we would just do it – which we did.”
“Only having 7 weeks also worked in our favour because it meant that it had to be simple – which is what we were comfortable with. When planning it we just thought about the things you need for a party – not a wedding – which made it so much easier to keep it to just the things we wanted.”
“I guess what really made our wedding unique was how we viewed the day”, she continued. “Both Tristan and I never wanted a ‘wedding’. For us it really just felt like the right moment to celebrate our last eight years together with or closest family and friends who had been part of that journey. We really wanted to say thank you (as a team) to everyone else for sharing our lives and supporting us.”
“Part of that was we didn’t want a ‘big special day’. Instead we wanted something that was extremely low-key, around the local area in places that reflect our lives together at this very point in time. The whole day reflected this – we got ready together in our tiny apartment, walked to the cafe around the corner to get married at Hobba and had photos together in our local streets, and at our local train station and supermarket. We were actually the last ones to leave our wedding – once we saw everyone got on the tram or in a cab to go home safety.”
“Doing the photos at the start of the day was the best thing we did. It meant we could spend the whole wedding time with our friends and family. I loved having that private time together before the wedding. I also loved that our wedding and our photos were around our local area so whenever I’m walking home from the train station or down the streets we had photos, or go to the supermarket, it’s a reminder of the day.”
“We choose to get married at Hobba because we both love the space as it is, and it really reflects our design aesthetic. Because of this, and that fact that we wanted to keep the day as simple as possible, we didn’t feel that any wedding decorations or flowers were needed, particularly as they would also detract for the warehouse image.”
“I did however want to put my creative stamp on the space, so instead made these straw mobiles which we hung from the wooden rafters! I bought the packets of straws from a local party supply store. There were heaps of colour to choose from and they only cost for 79 cents per packet. I bought the straws with the bends in the end and locket 3 straws of the same colour together to make a flat triangle. I then taped 3 flat triangles together to make 3D triangles and then stuck those ones to other 3D triangles of different colours to make the organic, geo-metric objects.”
Andrea wore a skirt and cami top instead of a traditional wedding dress. But she did opt for white. “Funnily enough, the most traditional thing was that I wore white – which defiantly wasn’t planned. I did also have a navy, bright yellow and grey dresses in the running, but unfortunately my best friend is much more traditional when it comes to weddings decided I was going to wear the white skirt/top combo – which then meant I spend the rest of the day coming to terms with the fact that I was wearing white!”
“We really saved money by not having most of the ‘stuff’ that comes with weddings”. Andrea concluded. “Our biggest expenses were good food, good wine and a good photographer. There is nothing at all that we’d change about our wedding and our advice to other couples would be to just do exactly what makes the both of you happy. The best weddings I have been to are always the ones that best reflect the couple.”
