Palm Springs, a desert city in southern California, is known for its hot springs, stylish hotels and gorgeous mid century modern architecture. For Bernadette and Andrew it also provided the perfect backdrop for their poolside ceremony meets intimate dinner party wedding.
“The great part about having your wedding in the wonderland that is Palm Springs is that the theme basically sets itself!”, began the bride. “We love the mid-century desert oasis aesthetic of the city and tried to leverage as much of that as we could. But really, because our wedding was intentionally kept very small (30 total people, including us), overall the theme was ‘intimate dinner party’. Since our wedding was Halloween weekend (we first kissed on Halloween, and Andrew proposed on Halloween!), our ‘rehearsal dinner’ was actually a giant Halloween costume party – I wore a giant inflatable banana costume and Andrew wore a wedding dress from Amazon – that he later jumped in the pool while wearing!”
They were married by the pool at the La Chureya Estate followed by a low key dinner reception at Workshop Kitchen+Bar. “Because our venue is also a rental estate, we stayed there for the entire weekend with both of our families and invited friends to make a weekend of it, as well. When our guests arrived, each received a glitter heart pin to wear. We also gave each a vintage Palm Springs travel post card, which we asked them to fill out and send to us as our guest book.”
“We held the ceremony in the courtyard with all our friends and family gathered around. Our two best friends Stephen and Janelle co-officiated, and even gave a beautiful sing-a-long duet of Ingrid Michaelson’s You And I. It felt very personal and intimate and lovely.”
After dinner, they all went back to the house for post-wedding pizza and dancing. Sounds like the perfect end to the most laid back, beautiful wedding EVER! “There’s nothing we’d do differently”, Bernadette concluded, “we had the perfect weekend and the small, intimate vibe we were looking for! The only thing I keep thinking about is what other dresses I would have worn – but that’s just a residual obsession with Say Yes to the Dress! My dress came from Self Portrait (Kate Middleton wore it three days after our wedding!), my shoes were Stuart Weitzman and my best and ‘Just Married’ headpiece were by Crown and Glory.”
“Our advice to other couples would be, before doing anything, make a list of your true priorities and use those as a guiding light when making plans and choices. There is a lot of great inspiration out there (like Rock n Roll Bride!), but if you can, try to make it as personal as you can – both in looks and feel.”
