Through it. In spite of it. Because of it.
–OUR VOWS
Leanne
Ever try to plan a wedding in four days?
I did. And it was my idea of perfection.
It was a Wednesday night in November, and Erik and I were staying at the Bowery Hotel in New York City. We had been newly engaged for a couple of months. Erik was opening his first New York Buck Mason store, and I was designing the space.
Here we were, on this chilly New York night, cozy in this gorgeous hotel. We were talking about when we wanted to get married and where we wanted to get married. We were just at the beginning stage of hashing it out. All we knew at this point is that we couldn’t wait to be husband and wife.
Some brides dream of a huge wedding with hundreds of people. Not me. Since I was a little girl, I had dreamed of something romantic but tiny.
Erik, on the other hand, wanted a big wedding. And because I love Erik, I didn’t want to talk him out of it. I didn’t want to let him down from his dream.
“Let’s write our guests down,” I said. Just write down the most important people in our lives. So we did. And the list kept going and going. Turned out that we had a whole lot of people we loved. Erik and I both have lived in so many cities—we have friends scattered all over the country. We have large families; we have friends we still talk to from youth; huge support teams within our businesses. I’m telling you, the list just went on and on.
Erik and I looked at each other and back at this never-ending list. We were having a shared moment. You know when you look at someone and it’s like you’re reading each other’s minds? It was clear that we were both overwhelmed by how many people we’d want to invite.
“We could just, you and me . . . get married,” I said. “And let people know after it happens. I guess in a word, elope.” I was kind of joking about eloping, but maybe I wasn’t.
Did we really need all these people? If we wanted to get married, we should just get married.
There are so many expectations that families and society put on us. When you are planning a wedding, please, do not listen to every person in your life. You cannot listen to your parents. (Okay, sometimes listen to your parents. Mom’s only advice on this wedding—to find a beautiful venue instead of city hall—was actually the most important twist in the entire plan. And I am so glad we listened.) You cannot listen to your friends. (Okay, take some advice—but for heaven’s sake, don’t take it all!)
Erik took another long look at the list. He heard what I was saying.
“Why were we going to wait a year to get married? So we could get everyone in a room drinking and dancing? We could do that on a Tuesday!” I said. “Let’s figure out what we want. What if we just get married, you and me?”
Erik looked at me and gave me his dreamy little smile. “As long as our moms are there,” he said, “I’m good.”
Yes, that’s right. That’s the kind of guy I married: a guy who not only cares about his own mom but who also cares about mine.
We started dreaming up details that night, together in our room at the Bowery Hotel. First, we decided to have just our immediate families—that’s about eighteen people. Then we went to the next step: location. Where did we want it?
“It has to be beautiful on its own, without my help,” I said.
I spend my days making spaces beautiful and deciding every tiny detail. I didn’t want to do that for our wedding day. Really, I didn’t want to do much.
“I don’t want to have to pick any decor. I don’t want to have to worry about napkins. I don’t want to talk about lighting. I just want to show up,” I told him. It just had to be pretty.
Erik looked around at the beautiful hotel room we were in. “Why don’t we just do it here?” he said.
And all of a sudden, it became very clear. Yes, of course. We should 100 percent do it here!
When these little lightning bolts strike, you have to jump on them. They don’t come often. Your instinct will lead the way. It will allow you to create the best possible decisions for yourself, even if it seems slightly wild. And it was wild, what we were about to do, but it sounds wilder than it actually was. It was really just two people in love who were getting married, like millions of people in love have done before us.
Now, it was around midnight. “Call down to the front desk,” I said. We needed to know if this was even possible. Did they have the space for us? Were they booked until June 2045? What the heck did it cost? We called down and left a message for the events people, giggling at our self-proclaimed genius.
Erik and I met in Venice, California. He walked into my backyard with a friend while a few of us were sitting around a fire. It was a beautiful California night. The truth is, there was no magic spark; there was no uh-oh moment. He was nothing but a nice guy in a cowboy hat, sitting across the fire in my backyard.
I do remember one thing about that night, though—I remember appreciating his energy. I remember how nice it was to hear his laughter in our backyard. I couldn’t even tell you what he looked like at that moment, but he did have a glow around him. Or maybe that was just the fire pit.
After that night, my friends and I would see Erik around Venice. We’d wave to each other and be on our way.
Years later, I went to one of his Buck Mason parties. He had a tiny little store off Abbott Kinney, a shopping street in Los Angeles, that sold T-shirts and jeans, and something was different.
Erik says that he started dating me six months before I started dating him. He pursued me for a long time. We’d go out for dinner; we’d go out for drinks. We would stay out and talk all night long. No kissing; we’d hug good night, and off he’d go. He would call me the next day to make plans for the next time we could hang out—true to his course. He was on a mission.
At first, I didn’t want to kiss him. Didn’t think a second thought about him; he was just a great guy that I liked to be around. In hindsight, I think I might have been fooling myself. As we talked more, as we became closer, and I started to realize what an amazing man he was, all I wanted was to kiss him, but I continued to wait. I knew this was different. I knew that first kiss would change the trajectory of my life. I knew if I kissed him, there was no turning back. And as I sit here writing this, with a big smile on my face and feeling our sweet little girl kicking inside of me, I’d say I was definitely right.
I say to him now, “I’m so glad you pursued me, that you knew what you wanted and that you knew better than I did.”
That’s just his brain. He’s a conscious guy. Even three thousand miles away, I feel his presence more than I feel that of most people who are in the same room with me. He’s emotionally present, and I need that. I’m an emotional human being. I feel everything. I mean, I tear up at commercials!
When we started dating, Erik said to me, “It’s so wild. I feel like I’ve known you a million years—but also like we just met yesterday.” To this day, that’s how I feel about him: like we’ve known each other for a million years, but we just met yesterday. As Erik says every day when he gets out of bed and looks around at the amazing world that we are lucky enough to live in, “What a life!”
My little dreamy love-filled cocoon with Erik, planning our tiny romantic wedding, had one interruption. That Thursday I had to fly from New York to Knoxville for a big shoot for HGTV. I was so busy with work that day that I couldn’t even check in with Erik about updates. I just went along with my day, hoping it would work out.
That afternoon, Erik texted me the two greatest sentences: “Call me. It’s all planned.”
I’m sorry. What? The groom planned our entire wedding?
The answer: yes.
Ladies, I highly recommend you get yourself a man who can plan a wedding. Turns out that morning, while I was on the way to the airport, he walked down to the front desk and found Amanda Len, the director of special events at the Bowery Hotel, and the two of them just . . . arranged it all.
“Amanda loved our story, and she hooked us up! The wedding is Sunday evening,” he said. “We can be there at 5:00 p.m. We can have the ballroom for two hours, and then we’ll walk down to the restaurant, Gemma, for dinner in the private room. They’re just going to give us menus and bottles of wine.”
It was Thursday. Our wedding was going to be Sunday.
“Do we say go?” Erik said.
Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “You have to color outside the lines once in a while if you want to make your life a masterpiece.” We’re all so concerned about making everything fit in a box that someone else drew for us—especially when it comes to weddings—but life doesn’t always need to work that way. Erik and I were so busy with our schedules that, for us, having a wedding in this amount of time was an amazing blessing. And let’s just say we aren’t scared of spontaneity. We love coloring outside the lines. In fact, let’s not even color outside the lines; I say, let’s make new lines. That’s exactly what we did with this wedding.
“I love it,” I said. “Let’s call our moms.”
Because if our moms couldn’t be there, or if they weren’t thrilled with this plan of ours, it was going to all lose steam real quick.
I called Mom from Knoxville. “Hi, Mom. Hiiii. Uh . . . Can you be in New York on Sunday?” I asked her.
Reminder: it was now Thursday.
“Hi, honey! . . . Huh?”
“Well, Erik and I want to get married in New York on Sunday. We just want to make sure you can be there.”
Mom paused. She’s known me for thirty-seven years. She knows how I operate—sometimes on the spur of the moment. But she was still trying to talk it through with me. Was I sure I wanted to have this kind of wedding? Was I sure I wanted it right now?
Yes, I was absolutely sure, I told her. We just want to do it. And we want to do it here.
She wasn’t saying no, so that was something. “Well. What’s Erik’s mom saying?”
Erik’s mom asked the same question: “What’s Leanne’s mom saying?” I think they were both hoping the other one was going to say no. Not that they didn’t want us to marry each other, but I’m sure the spontaneity of it all gave them a bit of a surprise.
Of course, then we had to contact our families. Could Erik’s sisters get there? Was Steve free? Could Michelle and her husband and kids pull this off? Yes. Yes. Yes. Everyone can do it. Everyone can be there Sunday.
It just seamlessly all fell in place. It was a go. Or more aptly, it was go time.
I needed a dress, and Erik also needed something to wear. He found a tuxedo down the street at a resale shop. He surprised me. I walked down the aisle to a man in a three-piece Italian tuxedo—dreamy!
I texted my assistant in LA. “I have this big, flowy dusty rose vintage dress in my closet,” I wrote. “Can you overnight it to me? And also, can you send those red suede heels?” I didn’t want anyone to catch on to what we were doing, so about a minute later I texted her again: “Date night!” With some kind of heart emoji or something.
Friday I got the box—a gorgeous vintage Christian Dior silk dress and perfect Alaïa heels, all shoved into a little wrinkled ball. But that sums me up perfectly. I opened it like it was a treasure chest filled with gold. And it was a treasure chest, wasn’t it? My beautiful, floor-length gown was shoved in this box; out it came. My wedding dress—check. (I actually never got around to steaming it, which you can tell in pictures. Oops!)
By Friday, I was back in NYC. I forgot to mention that Saturday was the big opening of Erik’s Buck Mason store, which I was helping design and install. (I know, I know. We really are crazy.)
There were a few more wedding details we had to take care of. We needed a cake, for instance! Erik and I headed to the bakery on the corner, just down the street from his store—and of course it just happened to have a famous chocolate cake. We ordered two pretty cakes: chocolate and vanilla.
Music? Check: got it covered. We hired a four-piece jazz band from Brooklyn to sing and play for a couple of hours. It’s New York City—the world is your oyster.
“We need champagne on a silver tray,” Amanda Len, the event director, said. “And we will have them handed out in white gloves.” I’m telling you, Amanda made sure our wedding was lovely and beautiful.
What was next? Flowers. The hotel suggested a florist in the neighborhood. I practically skipped over there in my little cloud-nine world and floated into the flower shop.
“Hi! I’m getting married in two days,” I said. “We need a couple of bouquets and three flower crowns for our nieces, please. Whatever you think works. Just have them match the Bowery Hotel.”
The Bowery Hotel has an earthy palette with deep green velvets and dusty pinks, red drapes and leather sofas. Rich maroon tapestries hang on the wall, and murals in the lobby look worn and aged as if they’ve been there a hundred years. Dark wood paneling lines the walls, and the exposed wood ceilings seem as if they’re straight out of an Italian tavern.
The florist nodded and said that she would pull something together to “match the Bowery.” That was the extent of my flower planning.
I can’t help but smile thinking about it. My bouquet looked as if I had picked it from a fall garden: deep reds and dusty roses, like my dress. Swoon. The flower girls’ crowns were made of bay laurels with dusty pink roses; they carried messy bouquets of bay laurel. Erik’s niece wore a lovely black lace dress, and my two little nieces wore dusty pink chiffon skirts and maroon sweaters. And, of course, I went and found them flowered Dr. Martens boots—an ode to my everyday boot. They all looked darling.
Photographer? I called my fashion photographer friends, Lowfield, that I had hired for years back in my creative direction days.
“I need a favor,” I said. “Can you be in New York on Sunday? I want you two to shoot my wedding!”
I gave them complete carte blanche. I told them, “Shoot it however you want.” And I meant it. They’re professional photographers. They have that magic eye. I told them very specifically, “I don’t need—or want—anything except to capture this moment. Just capture the night.”
We weren’t exactly going to the chapel to get married, but nevertheless, we needed someone official to marry us, someone who represented the two of us and our faith. My childhood Young Life leader and pastor, Chris Buda (yep, Buda!), was a really good family friend. Chris was a huge part of my childhood, good friends with my dad and our entire family, and an important part of my faith. This was a huge decision that Erik and I were making. We wanted it to be with someone with deep connections and roots to who we were.
Buda lives in Pittsburgh, but I called him. I believe they call this a “Hail Mary.”
“Chris, can you be here Sunday?” I said. “Erik and I are getting married, and we want you to officiate.”
Chris came out to New York City on such short notice just to marry us. The stars aligned for us. It really did feel that way.
By Saturday night, the night before the wedding, everybody was there. Both sides of our immediate family had just met for the first time at the Buck Mason opening earlier that day. We were in this beautiful hotel. There was a fire glowing in the lobby. Everyone was thrilled and, yes, surprised.
Erik’s business partner, Sasha Koehn, and his wife, Victoria, were in town for the opening of the store, so of course they were going to come to the wedding too. As an added and very magical perk, Victoria is a calligrapher. That night, in my hotel room, I wrote out an invitation that read something like this: “The pleasure of your company is requested this evening . . .” Victoria then crafted the invitations in calligraphy on the Bowery Hotel stationery. (Work with what ya got!) It also helps that their stationery looks like a European love letter. But really, there were no rules here. We didn’t have paper. We didn’t have letterpress. I didn’t have note cards. But, hey, we had a professional calligrapher!
Erik asked the front desk for a typewriter. They had one, which cracks me up. He sat in the lobby and typed out each guest’s name on the Bowery Hotel envelopes.
That night, while everyone was sleeping, we slipped the handmade invitations under each person’s hotel door. That way, they’d find them first thing in the morning. They’d actually get an invitation to the wedding. It was really the magic icing on top.
Sunday morning, I was in a dream. I was so grateful that both of our families were able to be by our side. I thought of Dad. How much he would have loved Erik. How similar they are. How proud he’d be that I was picking such a great man and creating such a beautiful life for myself.
I walked down the aisle to “Let It Breathe” by the Water Liars. It was a song that summed us up to a tee.
I had my dusty rose gown on and walked toward him as he stared warmly at me. Erik later told me, “You looked like a Greek goddess that traveled from the 1920s to marry me.” It was the best day of my life.
After the short, simple ceremony, we piled down the stairs into the hotel restaurant. Our wedding dinner was one big long table in a small, cozy room. We feasted on an amazingly gorgeous dinner with the wine flowing. After dinner, we all sat in the lobby in front of the fire. Our New York friends showed up and celebrated with us. It was a beautiful and, dare I say, perfect night. We are all still basking in the glow of it.
Mom, Michelle, and I always talk about how special it all turned out. Mom said we really left no detail unchecked. Erik and I reminisce about it—how we hacked the system. This is true. I really feel if we had tried to plan our wedding for a year, it wouldn’t have come off so well.
Some of my friends won’t get married because they don’t want to deal with the wedding, and I say, “You don’t have to deal with the wedding. You just have to focus on the love.”
One of my favorite photos of the night is a group photo. No one is looking at the camera. Erik and I are at the end of a long wooden table filled with our families on each side. I’m smiling at Erik. He’s got a serious look, like he’s about to kiss me. Two candelabras glow on the wall. Straw baskets hang from the ceiling, a massive gold-framed mirror with a smoky frame behind us. A beautiful haze warms up the room. The two of us are surrounded by the people we love most in the world.
Our family. Our life. And what a life it is!