Southern Hospitality

One aspect of our wedding that is so important to Phil and I is our guest experience, and in particular, the atmosphere of hospitality we intend to create. It involves a lot of forethought and moving parts, but at the end of the day, what we want to remember is what it felt like to be surrounded by love and happiness on our wedding day.

We are planning a constant flow of food and drink. We are so focused on feeding our guests that our initial menu design meeting with our caterer turned into a list of about 60 must-have items! Thank goodness she is patient! We can’t help it, we just love food.

The day will begin and end with munchies. None of our guests will have to look at their watches with empty stomachs growling during the ceremony. We are inviting them to arrive at the outdoor ceremony site (in February!) 30 minutes before the processional begins to enjoy a warm beverage bar, hot soups and grilled cheeses. Casual conversations, reunions and a few relaxed moments between family and friends will provide the perfect start to a warm, full-bellied, intimate evening.

As our guests walk through the red double doors into the marbled hall of the Carillon, they will be served Prosecco with simply the cutest gold pom pom drink stirrers. (Side note: my family was thrilled when I sprung craft night on them over the holidays!). Food will be butler passed throughout the entire night – even during dinner. No one is leaving our wedding hungry.

Rather than boring, lackluster jazz or sleepy classical, the band will kick off a high energy set right at the start of cocktail hour. Our goal is to get our guests on that dance floor before dinner is served. The meal service is family style with a twist. A few options will be placed on the table for all to share while staff will continue to butler heartier portions of food. Everywhere you turn you can expect an edible surprise!

Even in the weeks leading up to our big day, we are still refining the menu. You may be saying to yourself “I totally get that” or maybe you’re floored by our food-focused wedding mentality. Maybe the thought of floor-to-ceiling, gigantic, elaborate centerpieces makes you melt the way the idea of over-the-top hospitality and our favorite gastronomic treats turn us weak in the knees. Your couple personality and wedding priorities will dictate how you choose to wow your guests – just keep their happiness and comfort foremost in your mind and your wedding, like ours, is destined to be a celebration no one will forget!

designing an event that "feels" right

It should come as no surprise that the design aspect of our wedding planning has been the easiest part for me. While I’d gladly hand off to another expert my own home design, including hanging artwork or picking out curtains, there is something about designing an event that truly excites me. Perhaps it’s because it is the departure from our everyday experience – something totally different than sitting at your own breakfast table and at your own household linen.

In fact, the “experience” is what Phil and I have chosen as our most important wedding element. It reflects our own couple culture of cherishing the experience of everyday living, and of each day together. At the end of the day, with intention, we come together to cook a meal, not just sit and eat. We do things as partners that others simply take for granted. At our wedding, we want to celebrate those intentional moments by sharing our “experience” with our guests.

 

{photos by PhotoLadyLove}

Phil and I can describe our wedding in one simple word: warm. In a winter month, it would be obvious and easy to do the exact opposite (for it will, in all likelihood, be COLD). So, we have chosen to go the route of intimacy, bringing in warmth from the food (will share food details soon!), the décor, and the signature hospitality. The overall aesthetic, and the comfort of our loved ones on the wedding day is far more important to us than any fancy flower arrangement or matte satin linen. We’re skipping elaborate centerpieces and custom lighting because they don’t fit the “feel” that we are trying to achieve.

We chose warm tones, such as eggplant, sage, champagne, gold, slate and navy. Huge helpings of magnolia will line the tables. Add to that candle light and a pop of sparkle! Who doesn’t love a pop of sparkle? Food is so important to Phil and I that we’re even decorating with it! Artichokes, oranges, and lemons will brighten the tables. A few arrangements of flowers, dispersed around the room and featuring hydrangea, dusty miller, more magnolia and herbs will tie the perfect wintry floral palette together.

Stepping briefly back into “Wedding Planner” mode, for the brides-to-be who are reading this, take my advice: put yourselves in your guests’ shoes. Try, as best you can, to visualize your day and do a virtual walk-through, looking for opportunities to grace your loved ones with hospitality and love. Look for potential points of tension and craft ways to eliminate them. Figure out where your guests will spend the most time, and where you want their attention focused, and spend your energy there. For you, it could be tearing up the dance floor, or marveling at the dining tables, or maybe even gorging themselves on cake. Each event dynamic is as unique as your couple personality is, so there is no “prescription” for the perfect atmosphere. However, if you look at your event from this perspective, you will certainly focus less on flashy centerpieces, and more on your own guest experience and the overall “feel” of the day.

Whether or not 100% of my guests notice the small details, this “experience” excites me the most (naturally, the FOOD excites Phil the most!). Everything from a “basket of blankets to borrow” with cozy wintry white blankets and a gold “Richmond, Virginia” embroider, to our favorite recipes handed out as favors is special and thoughtful. Sparkly pom pom toothpicks will hold our late night snack burgers together, and you know the stationery will be beautiful to boot.

Next, we’ll talk about food from the hospitality perspective (I know, I know – you want a menu!), and how service can mean so much when creating a specific guest aesthetic. More soon!

save the dates!

If you’re going to launch into a challenging custom printing project, it helps to have an
incredibly talented graphic and web designer as a sister. Thankfully, mine fit the bill! I had
a specific save-the-date in mind ever since I first launched LK Events & Design. I fell in love with a storybook-meets-timeline idea that would give insight into our couple personality and our history together, and I tasked my sister with making that dream come true.

As an “original” type, I of course wanted to stay away from magnets and photo save-the-
dates which have become a little too cliché for someone who lives and breathes weddings.
I commissioned exactly what I envisioned. They feature a simple, but beautiful timeline that
starts with a chance meeting at a local watering hole, and includes golden moments and
milestones that are now immortalized forever. The look is simple and contemporary with
an outline of our beloved Richmond that my brilliant sister drew by HAND! Within a week of
submitting text, the perfect save-the-dates weren’t just ready, they were mailed and winging their way to our lucky guests.


Helpful Hints for Custom Printing

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a graphic designer in the family, but custom printing is
still relevant and available if you want it. Do your research and find a reliable designer with
a body of work in a style, or variety of styles, you love. Schedule a consultation in person, or
via video or phone chat, and give an honest and account of what you picture when you dream of your ideal invites. Include photos of printed products you love, textures that turn you on, and even the quirky things that made him love you and you love him. Be honest about your budget limitations, but also open-minded about services you might decide are worth the investment. Get, and check, references.

Custom printing goes way beyond a nice font treatment on traditional card stock. Today you
can print on pretty much anything that will stand still long enough. Brides are choosing strips
of delicate wood, pretty pieces of linen and even elaborate, luxurious boxes packed with
multiple layers of printed intrigue or customized antique books in place of single-panel, formal and traditional invitations. Let your imagination soar a little and you may have the next most brilliant save-the-date ever (right after mine, of course!).

The Registry

Okay, if I’m being totally honest with you, I have to say that I hated one part of our early wedding process more than anything: The Registry. I didn’t think I would, either. I mean, it’s shopping – what could be more fun than shopping? Phil, on the other hand, naturally, loved it. We are a strange pair.

We knew we needed to select fairly mainstream stores as our guests live everywhere, and we are pretty down-to-earth people. So we chose Crate & Barrel and Bed, Bath and Beyond. We didn’t want super stuffy china. I have my eye on my grandmother’s set in my mother’s attic anyway. We are also set on crystalware. We mostly needed great flatware, some practical china and most important: great wine glasses. “Easy,” I thought. We’ll be done and out in a couple of hours.

If only…

We were off to a decent start at Crate & Barrel. We chose Roulette china and Halstead flatware, but only after Phil picked up every single piece of flatware in search of the heaviest, most durable spoon. We even chose our wine glasses, the Vin set, which was no easy feat considering our criteria: they had to be big, with a stem that was not to tall, and not too thin as I break everything. The choice was important as the glasses will get far more use than the spoons.

After about an hour, though, I found myself standing, staring blankly at the wall of Crate & Barrel while Phil made “exciting”, casual conversation with a sales associate about knife collections. Who knows what she was thinking of me as I wandered aimlessly between napkins and vases, completely burnt out with blood sugar plummeting. Suddenly I snapped, abruptly ended the conversation with the associate and announced to Phil that I was done. Unfortunately, he wasn’t, so, on he went with his merry scanning as I slid deeper and deeper into Registry Hell.

Bed, Bath and Beyond was no different. By the tenth time that I advised Phil I didn’t care about some item he wanted me to evaluate, he recognized his advantage in the situation and went scanner happy for the rest of our visit. When we receive a kayak and his-and-hers whirlpool foot baths as wedding gifts I will have to remind myself that I did set him free with the scanner.

Even the most highly anticipated wedding tasks can sometimes be really draining. Brides often don’t realize how much additional energy they have to output while carrying on their daily work and home lives in preparation for their Big Day. Break up your registry trips on multiple days, and try to keep your visits painlessly short and focused. Enlist your fiancé’s help with this task as he may very well enjoy it as much as Phil! Just know that you’ll need to accept the consequences if you delegate the job and may end up with an unusual set of gifts.

Check in soon for more of this wedding planner’s own planning adventure!

choosing our venue

I’ve officially dubbed venue selection the hardest part of our planning process. We did everything I would tell my clients: we came up with a list of our priorities together, explored all available options and judged the contenders against our “must-have” criteria.

This is what we deemed most important:

1.      It could not be a place that I’ve worked before. No matter how much I love my clients and my career, it’s just better to separate work from personal life, so the first challenge was to eliminate my long list of go-to venues and still have a list of great possibilities.

2.      It had to be in the city – in the heart of Richmond. We love the RVA more than words.

3.      I had to be able to bring in my own caterer (fellow wedding planners will understand why this is simply non-negotiable).

4.      *It had to be an inside space. When you’re choosing your wedding venue, you have to know yourself, and I know that I’m not the kind of person who can be okay with Plan B. No one likes the gray interiors of banquet halls or the wrinkled walls of last-minute rain-plan tents.

*Of course, as often happens, we fell in love with an “almost perfect” space: Carillon at Byrd Park. Our caterer recommended it as a very unique space (note to brides: caterers often know all the secret spots!) and most people don’t even know that there is an event space under the memorial.  The main thing we loved was the rooftop terrace, which would mean hosting part of our event outdoors, so we made a compromise on #4 and took the leap with Carillon.

 

{carillon at byrd park}

Note that on our must-have list, we weren’t stuck on any particular date. I figured that calling Parks and Rec to secure the space would be the easy part. We would just choose our date based on their availability. It’s a really good thing we were flexible, however, as they only had TWO dates open: February 23 and September 28. Phil’s inclination was to choose the September date when the weather was most likely to be nice. Of course it was. Several of my wise clients had the same idea, and September 28 would put our wedding squarely in the midst of wedding season.

At first I wasn’t sure at all that February 23 would be a viable date. We made a list of pros and cons, talked it over with family and agonized over the decision for weeks. Finally, we decided that the pros outweighed the cons and we settled on a February wedding.

And then…we FELL IN LOVE with the idea of a February wedding! From a design perspective, we have so many unique options that you don’t see at local weddings every week, and we truly want an event that is totally our own. Besides, having an outdoor winter wedding in Richmond, Virginia in February confirms what we already knew about ourselves: that we are certifiably insane (and crazy in love!).

If there is any lesson for other brides in our venue search, it is that you have to know yourselves really well. Make a list of your priorities, and make smart choices. If you sense that you’re choosing something that you actually cannot make you happy, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment on the wedding day. There are enough factors that you can’t control (nature, for one, and in some extreme cases your crazy relatives) that it makes sense to manage the ones you can.

Be flexible, though, when there is room in your vision for something new. You might just discover the perfect space is a place you never considered, or learn that a winter wedding makes you wild with excitement.

Next up? Our amazing save-the-dates, working with a custom designer and (insert ominous music here): the registry.