Walking into the Legendary Park Plaza during our venue search took my breath away. It was our very first venue and I knew the search was over. It was dramatic, sophisticated, historical and most importantly, not a hotel ballroom. All of our wedding ideas flowed from there. We quickly settled on a vintage Hollywood “theme.” I was largely inspired by art deco elements when making the design choices. The feather centerpieces were my first idea and everything else sort of fell into place after that.
Most other decor and design elements were a DIY labor of love for my husband and I and my entire family. My grandpa helped us make our table numbers. Each number had pictures of my husband at the age that corresponded to the numbers. He also made huge plexiglass trays that we filled with white feathers to hold the escort cards. All the paper products were made by my husband and I. We spent MANY hours folding, printing, cutting, stapling, and assembling our invitations, programs, menus and escort cards. When we couldn’t find a ketebah, (jewish marriage contract), that we liked, we used one of our engagement photos and wrote our own language to superimpose on the photo.
Favorite Memory: Our first look was probably the most emotion part of the day. It was just me and my husband and our photographer and videographer. We were both speechless and crying for about 15 minutes. It was one of the most emotional, thrilling, connected moments we’ve ever shared. After taking all the photos our Rabbi took us and our bridal party and immediate family into a private room to sign our Ketubah. But before we did, we each spent some private time with our families. It was so touching to be able to take time out of our day to tell our families how important they are to us and how much all their support means to us.
The Reception…
Once of the best wedding planning decisions we made was we hired an amazing day of coordinator who took care of everything on the day of and coordinated all vendors leading up to the wedding. If anything went wrong on the day of the wedding, we didn’t know about it because she and her team of magical assistants took care of every detail. It made the whole day completely stress free. During the wedding process we kept reminding ourselves that most things didn’t matter and our number one focus was on expressing our love to each other and on making sure our guests had a wonderful time. We always tried to keep in mind that while we were the focus of the wedding, it wasn’t just about us. We wanted to make sure our families and friends had a wonderful time and a night they and we would never forget.
