We feel so fortunate that we got to have the perfect destination wedding that we always dreamed of last October. So many months of planning went into creating our dream weekend in Rome. Working with our wedding planner, Cristen Faherty, and the rest of our wedding vendor team, we designed every little detail to create magical moments for our closest family and friends. While times are tough right now, hopefully this virtual tour through our planning process is a welcome wedding-inspo-escape! This is how to design your dream destination wedding!
Destination Wedding Mood Board Planning
The first step in designing a bespoke destination wedding is a mood board! Cristen is the master of wedding mood boards, so much so that we had three for our wedding! One for the welcome party on Friday night, one for the wedding ceremony and one for the wedding reception. For the welcome party we had a bright, modern look, for the ceremony we wanted a beautiful, dreamy setting and for the reception we wanted a romantic, dinner party feel. Check out the amazing mood boards Cristen created for us below!
If you read our blog post on Why You Need a Wedding Planner, you know that a big part of working with a wedding planner like Cristen is that she guides and manages the entire wedding planning process. So, before she created these mood boards, we had several detailed discussions with her about our goals for the wedding weekend and we filled out an extensive questionnaire so she would know exactly what we had in mind for our special day.
Custom Save The Dates
The next step after having our mood boards were our save the dates! With our color scheme and overall look and feel in place, it was time to come up with the save the date concept. We wanted to do something different, while at the same time drawing upon the culture of the destination. Our friend, Markus Sebastiano, is an amazing local Boston artist and so we commissioned him to create a piece of art that we could not only enjoy in our home but that we could share with our guests. Check it out!
Markus created this full size, multimedia piece of art for us and then scanned and printed art-quality prints for all of our save the dates. You can read more about the inspiration behind the creation of these in this piece on our wedding in Over the Moon.
Custom Destination Wedding Invitation Suite
Next in the design process was of course our full invitation suite. Cristen introduced us to Val, the Paper Perfectionist, an amazing custom stationer, also located in the Boston area. Working with Val was so much fun! Read all about the process of designing and choosing all the materials for our wedding invitations in our Creating Custom Wedding Invites post. The balance of colors; black, gold, pink and other metallics would all tie into our overall wedding design in Rome! And if you notice, the colors Val used, were pulled from Markus’s piece and Cristen’s mood boards.
Custom wedding invites by the Paper Perfectionist Bespoke wedding suite by the Paper Perfectionist The invite card to our reception by the Paper Perfectionist Detail shots of our wedding suite by the Paper Perfectionist The invite card to our ceremony by the Paper Perfectionist
And be sure not to miss the beautiful map that Shawna Koontz, another local artist, created to show our guests all the venues in relation to the beautiful sites of Rome!
Our Wedding Venues in Rome
I’ll go into our wedding venues in more depth in a following blog post. But you probably all know by now that we had our welcome party at the Sofitel Roma Villa Borghese, our wedding ceremony at Chiesa Santa Maria in Portico, our wedding reception at the Hotel Hassler and our after party at ToyRoom Rome. And I know they all play a big role in the overall aesthetic of the wedding weekend, but I will get to them in their own post! (And you will see a few more sneak peaks into the details below!)
Destination Wedding Décor
Finally, after save-the-dates and invites, the next step in the design is working on the décor, florals and other design aspects for the actual venues where the wedding celebrations will be held.
As you have all started to see on Instagram, we went with Noosheens Floral Event Design in Rome for all things flowers, Latini Design for our tables and flatware rentals and BBJ Linens for our linens.
Working with Noosheen was such a dream on the florals. After several discussions with her on our concept, showing her the design plans and mood boards from Cristen, Noosheen came up with her own detailed design plans for the specific types of flowers, placements, etc. Our next blog post will be all about the flowers so be sure to stay tuned to see exactly what she did with the church and the reception!
2 responses to “How to Design a Destination Wedding”
Thank you so much for the opportunity and the challenge. It was an immense pleasure being part of the team.
The florals were just amazing!