The special intimacy that comes with a first look has made this popular event a “must” for most couples planning their wedding day. Hannah and Garrett wanted to be able to be as present as possible on their wedding day, so they enlisted Autumn Nicole Photography to capture their first look shoot on the day before their wedding! We can’t get enough of Hannah’s Leanne Marshall gown, sage green and peach bouquet, and naturally glamorous hair and makeup. Hannah and Garrett’s first look photos radiate so much personality and love!
Venice Beach is one of the most quintessentially cool neighborhoods on Earth, so it’s no wonder Eden and Joel chose this beachy locale for their free-form wedding ceremony! Knowing that they wanted to keep their special day low-key, Eden and Joel decided on having their ceremony in the alley behind Eden’s parents’ house. After the extremely emotional Venice Beach ceremony that left everyone with happy tears, the couple treated their family and friends to a casual reception at The Brig. We can’t get enough of the effortlessly chic couple portraits that Yaro Photography captured of Eden and Joel on their walk around Venice Beach.
The Couple:
Eden and Joel
The Wedding:
Private Residence & The Brig, Los Angeles, California
The most important part of our wedding was to have our family experience something new and be surrounded in a background that represented one of our favorite places to be. Venice Beach embodies all of the botanical goodness I am obsessed with & the beach is where Joel feels is a second home. While living in LA, our apartment was in Koreatown, but one of our favorite escapes was going to the beach.
Oh everything was DIY! My dress was $15 from H&M along with $3 H&M Spanx & $1 thrifted corset bra. I’ve always imagined having a 70s boho style dress & I found this one while walking through the mall on my lunch break.
Working with our photographer Ruth on the day-of was amazing! I am a total control freak & am not sure when to let go. While we went food shopping, she made sure that Joel was dressed & got him to do a groom’s shoot. When we were preparing the food, she forced me to get my dress on & prepare for the ceremony. She made sure that we got all of the emotional and candid shots of each of our guest members. She captured the emotion of us during our handwritten vows and how my step-dad, Nolan, officiated us. It was nice to work with someone who was professional & experienced, helpful with the flow of the wedding day, and easy for everyone in our camera shy family to feel absolutely at ease around.
The biggest wedding day surprise was the location of where we shared our nuptials. We were pretty laid back about this. We knew we didn’t want to be on the windy beach & we loved the idea of going to the canals. Our biggest obstacle was it had to be easily accessible for a newborn, a four year old, and my gram & beating the 6pmAbbott Kinney traffic. We ended up doing the ceremony in the alley behind my parent’s rental house. It had these huge rocks for the ground & a wall full of greenery. My step-dad, Nolan, officiated the wedding and his words brought everyone to tears. Joel and I wrote our own vows and we both could barely get the words out. After the ceremony, we looked up and saw an entire family watching from the window clapping & crying too.
Since our wedding was a destination to a place we had already fallen in love with, we knew that it would be special to share that space with our loved ones. What we did not expect was how amazing and personal our officiant Nolan made our ceremony. He picked all of the right words, told our love story to everyone who attended, and made us feel like our decision to get married made the most sense for the next chapter in that story. It was the best part of the ceremony and most memorable part of the day.
At a certain part, everyone watching us started to cry. We could hear the girls just gasping for air like when you cry really hard & we knew we couldn’t look out or we would cry just as hard. This moment of everyone really feeling and sharing our love for each other was our favorite part. That is exactly why we wanted this part of our celebration to be intimate so we could really be involved in the words we shared with each other. The promise that we made to each other to be more than just words.
My wedding planning advice would be to make sure that everything you are doing is to make you both happy. Do not spend more than you can afford & do not plan more than you can handle alone. Stick to your budget. A lot of the extras get lost in the magic of the day. Book a responsible wedding planner & an experienced photographer. They will make your day go smoothly & will help take care of some of the things you will not be able to. I am a planner myself and perfectionist. It was difficult to let go, but it was nice to know the workload was shared.
Although botanical styling is my thing, I did not want to take away from the beauty the neighborhood already had. So we spent $4 on a single stem to decorate the table.
My gram & I went shopping for the food and picked up sushi & rosemary lemon chicken . We toasted bottles of champagne gifted from our friends and drank PBR from the bottle. Our reception was at The Brig, a dive bar located on Abbott Kinney Blvd. & drank Surfers on Acid on repeat. The DJ played 90s hip hop & lots of Tupac, Eden’s mom’s favorite. So you know we were dancing all night!
Congratulations to Eden and Joel, and a special thanks to Yaro Photography for sharing this wedding with us. Love the idea of taking photos in Venice Beach? Then you’ve got to see these Venice Beach engagement photos!
As if straight out of a movie, Alyssa and Jesse’s love story began when they met each other while waiting in line for their favorite Disneyland ride. Years later, the couple decided to draw décor inspiration from that very theme park ride for their Los Angeles wedding! Every detail of Alyssa and Jesse’s wedding at Clifton’s was vintage Disney-inspired, from Alyssa’s 1950s bridal style down to the couple’s first dance song, Sleeping Beauty‘s Once Upon A Dream. As wedding favors, Alyssa and Jesse provided a personalized silhouette service as a throwback to the old school Disney aesthetic. We love the vibrance that Anna Delores Photography captured in her documentation of the couple’s Disney-inspired wedding!
Collaboration, simplicity, and meaning were important to us. We wanted everything to be done together so our wedding truly represented both of us, and at the same time, wanted to focus more on what the day was about as opposed to how it looked (we just lucked out with the beautiful venue!). The details that we planned and brought in ourselves, from what we wore (Alyssa wore her Grandmother’s wedding dress from the ’50s), to how we decorated tables (with pine and orange as a nod to how we met, sourced from our family gardens as much as possible) all had purpose and meaning to us both.
We pulled as much inspiration as we could from the 30s-50s, mainly focusing on the ’50s as Alyssa‘s dress was from that era. She wore her grandmother’s wedding dress and had it tailored to her measurements. Her Grandmother had kept it perfectly preserved, and it was incredibly meaningful to wear the dress she had donned as she and my grandfather began their marriage over 50 years ago. Alyssa also wore a little sequined hat that mimicked the one her Grandmother wore on her own wedding day, and wore pearls given to her by her mother. Alyssa wanted her hair and makeup to reflect that time period as well, while still staying on the simple side, with a touch of modern influence. Kat Thompson, our incredible hair & makeup artist, accomplished this perfectly.
We loved the style and meaning behind Alyssa‘s whole outfit. She tries to wear as much of the ’50s era as possible in her everyday wardrobe, so it felt like a nice extension of something she already would wear, but special. She normally wears red lipstick, as well, but switched the tint to more of an orange to fit with their color story.
We actually chose our venue because it reminded us so much of how we met. We met by chance while waiting in line for Soarin’ Over California at Disneyland/California Adventure, and felt like Clifton’s seemed a really unique physical embodiment of an intangible experience. During the ride, you fly through different parts of California, including the redwoods and pine forest, where pine scents were sprayed out to add to the experience. It seemed perfectly fitting that we got married under a large fake pine tree! The rest of the space reminded us of a mix of the older attractions at Knotts Berry Farm and Disneyland. We’re old souls, and ate it right up.
Since we wanted our wedding to be as simple as possible, we really liked that we did not have to add any of our own decor or bring much in for entertainment. Each floor of Clifton’s is truly it’s own curiosity for young and old alike, made for a beautiful backdrop, and built-in wonder. We knew we wanted everything to be as simple as it could be, with as much personal meaning, old fashioned details, and natural/artificial elements combined without completely throwing off the said simplicity. We ended up focusing the chosen elements on ourselves, and specifically, the way we met.
We wove natural greens and citrus fruits into as much as we could, and found that we really only used our colors on the flowers. Everything else we kept to neutrals like white, ivory, or black. Meaningful and simple was our focus!
The most memorable part of the day was by far the ceremony itself. Feeling all the love surrounding us as we stood in front of the (not so) little fake tree, reading aloud the vows we wrote together with our hearts poured onto paper, and listening to the words our incredible officiant (The Rev. Millason Dailey) spoke as she talked about our lives and future together. It was a very powerful, albeit quick, experience, and we would live the ceremony itself over and over again if we could.
Our processional song was “My Blue Heaven” by Gene Austin. It reminded us of the life we had together, and envisioned for our future: heaven being found at home, with each other. Our recessional song was the soundtrack to the ride “Soarin’ Over California” (now a retired ride) at Disney’s California Adventure themepark. We played this song because this was how we met: waiting in line for the ride, and ultimately riding it together! The boldness of the beginning of the song seemed a fitting way to announce our marriage. Our first dance song was the “Finale” song from the original Sleeping Beauty Soundtrack. The chorus sang Once Upon a Dream, and we had our loved ones sing along to the sound as we danced. Magic!
We were pretty insistent that we wanted to EAT during our reception, because that’s what we hear people talk about the most that they regret not doing. But when we sat to eat, all we could think of was how special it was that so many people we loved were in this one place with us. We decided it was way more important to be with those people, and use the quick precious moments we had talking to as many of them as possible, instead of eating (other than a bite or two!). And we’re so happy we did!
We decided on an alternative favor option. We offered a photo booth (The Traveling Photobooth) and personalized silhouettes (Silhouettes by Candice) that guests could take home and frame. We loved both, and so did our guests! We recommend both highly. And you get to keep copies of the photos and cutouts of your guests as well! We have heard nothing but rave reviews about both since the wedding.
Our advice: Do your best to plan in advance, delegate as best as you can, and try (try! it’s so hard) to let go of the rest. It’s OK if it isn’t perfect. It’s life! And your wedding day, at its core, is a celebration of life and a relationship, not how perfect everything is. Easier said than done! Our other advice: plan as much as you can with your partner, and make it a collaborative experience. We grew a lot learning how to prioritize our time, goals, and budget for our wedding. We saw it as a special way to help strengthen our ability to problem solve together. And at the end, we felt like it was OUR wedding, not just the bride’s.
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