Botanical Wedding with a Mint Green Wedding Dress

A short mint green Chloe dress plus an extravagant floral wall can only add up to wedding perfection, if you ask me. Meryl and Jesse chose Brooklyn Winery as the home for their day of celebration, bringing along the talented Levi Stolove Photography, Jove Meyer Events, and Saipua to pull it off without a hitch. Let’s jump right into this beauty!

From the bride, Meryl: We had originally hoped to have our wedding in my parent’s backyard in Michigan but it quickly became clear that we were in over our heads – right around the time we started pricing out a luxury porta pottie and emergency generator. So Jesse and I thought about what a wedding in my childhood home might have felt like, and tried to create that in New York: a relaxed, intimate and lively environment, where our guests would feel appreciated and have the chance to comfortably enjoy one another’s company. The style elements developed from there. For example, because we wanted to prioritize our guests feeling welcome, we incorporated everyone’s individual names and note of thanks into our cocktail napkins, and at each place setting. In general, we opted not to go with a style that screamed “wedding!” because, once we had thought about it, we were more interested in throwing a fun, casual and lively dinner party – one where we just happened to have gotten married beforehand.

We worked with the stationer who did our invitations on some paper materials day-of, like the napkins, menu, table numbers and place-cards. But I made additional signage and favor cards myself, by downloading some free fonts and conjuring my 9th grade Photoshop skills. It looked pretty good! But my husband and I are not real DIY people and a great piece of advice I got about planning was that the wedding won’t fundamentally change who you are. In other words, don’t expect to get crafty for your wedding if you don’t already own a glue gun. Luckily, so many of our friends and family members are super talented makers and they were incredibly generous: a friend did the drawing that was on our Save the Date, another friend hand-painted our ketubah, and my aunt needle-pointed the chuppah.

Any advice for couples planning their weddings now? We’re so (so!) glad we went with a venue that had so much experience hosting weddings and so many amenities in-house, like catering and day-of coordination. The Brooklyn Winery is a wedding machine – and I mean that in the best possible way. Their expertise, and the fact they were working with in-house service and kitchen teams, meant that everything day-of ran so smoothly – which ultimately meant that I was able to truly, deeply enjoy my own wedding day. We knew we were in very good hands. I know going this route is not to every couple’s taste. Some couples want to plan the first wedding a restaurant or event space ever hosts – and more power to them! – but going with an full-service venue was definitely the right choice for us. And through the strategic use of rentals, flowers and other design elements, we were able to transform the space into something that felt like ours and reflected our aesthetic tastes.

A Bold Berry-Colored Vallejo Wedding

From the event designer, Jove Meyer Events: Meryl and Jesse wanted something very out of the box and different, which is why they brought me on board. We had a hand calligraphed save the date with am image their friend had drawn for them, and went with a square shape and eggplant colored text. The main invite came wrapped in an origami style box that guests opened to find the invite, reply card, weekend activities cards etc. At the wedding itself we continued the interesting origami inspired invite idea with hand made table numbers and custom place mats that also served as the name cards. Once the plate was lifted, there was art under each plate; it was the floral piece that the mother added in to the second round of design which anchored the stationery. The bride had a great idea and asked that we create the cocktail napkins with each guests name on them, which was a big hit! We color blocked the escort cards to add to the creative story of their wedding.