Most of my work is designing celebrations for other people. This one was ours.
On March 18, 2023, I married Dr. Brandon von Tobel in Charleston, the city where I was born and raised. We met the modern way; Brandon likes to joke that given my design career I am very good at shopping online, so it was fitting that I picked out my husband while shopping on Bumble. Our first date was at the bar of The Bowery Hotel, and three and a half years later to the day, he proposed at home while I sat on the floor playing with our puppy, Chewie. He looked at me, ring in hand, and declared, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” Without missing a beat I replied, “Was there a question in there?” Who was in the right remains a topic of ongoing debate.
I planned our wedding myself. I had a clear aesthetic perspective, deep industry relationships, and a strong desire to design a bespoke weekend centered on curated antiques and meaningful objects, seen through an interior designer’s lens. I approached it the way I approach a home: not a single event, but a series of distinct, immersive worlds.
Finding the venues
As an avid gardener, I knew from the beginning that I wanted a garden wedding. One afternoon, walking down King Street, we stopped into the Charleston Library Society to pick up a few books we had reserved. Almost immediately, we knew we had found our venue. It did not hurt that the Gibbes Museum of Art shares a lot line with the library, allowing a natural transition from ceremony to reception in the museum’s historic Lenhardt Garden. Our wedding marked the first time the two adjacent institutions were used together, through their historic iron garden gates. Both sit at the terminus of the Charleston Garden Club’s famed Gateway Walk, a detail that felt serendipitous and deeply meaningful.
A palette drawn from a jewel
As I developed our inspiration board, I kept returning to the symbolism behind my engagement ring, which ultimately set the jewel-toned palette for the entire weekend.
Brandon had designed the ring around a Colombian emerald, my May birthstone, flanked by trillion-cut diamonds for his April one. From that single stone, the weekend unfolded as three nights, three jewels: a sapphire welcome dinner where sea meets sky, a ruby Groom’s Dinner staged as a Dutch still life, and an emerald wedding day I called Alexandra’s Orangerie.
I firmly believe the invitation sets the tone for everything that follows, so we enlisted the calligrapher Stephanie Fishwick to design every printed piece, each woven with jeweled motifs keyed to its evening, and each crowned with a jeweled fan, a quiet nod to my logo. Ellen Weldon’s team produced the suite in an emerald velvet portfolio with a gold fan clasp engraved HvT. Those initials belonged to Brandon’s late father, Harry, an artist and a physician, and when we first saw the finished folders, we both cried.
The ceremony
It rained that morning, and the sky was still heavy as my father and I arrived at the library. At the top of the marble steps I clutched the cross on my late grandmother’s blue rosary beads, wrapped around my bouquet, looked up, and whispered, “I love you, Grandmom.” Just as the doors parted for my entrance, a brilliant ray of sunlight broke through the clouds. Guests still speak about that moment. Time seemed to stop.
We processed to Ludovico Einaudi’s “Experience,” arranged for piano and strings by Kiral Artists, wrote our own vows, and were married by a dear friend. As we began our recessional, a choir rose from the draped balcony above, singing “All You Need Is Love,” while musicians with brass instruments stood up one by one from among our guests: Brandon’s final surprise, lifted straight from our favorite holiday film. And as the serenade ended and we descended the steps, the church bells of Charleston began to toll across the city, right on cue.
Madeleine Castaing, under a tent
The tent’s exterior was designed to evoke a circus, because when is the merging of two families not a spectacle? Twin entrances were draped in peacock-blue velvet with apple-green fringe. Inside, the tent became a dilapidated French greenhouse in the spirit of Madeleine Castaing’s shop at 40 Rue Jacob: jade velvet walls, lattice hand-painted in Benjamin Moore’s Ming Jade, and unruly vines of ivy, wisteria, and morning glories trained overhead by Putnam Flowers as if untouched for decades. I wanted it to feel as though guests had been invited to dine in our long-abandoned greenhouse, one we had just dusted off and cleared of cobwebs for the evening. We left portions of the garden unfloored so the pea gravel could evoke the Jardin du Luxembourg, set our Grecian goddess in the fountain ringed by four antique stone goldfish, and let verdigris lanterns glow through the foliage.
Even the logistics were designed. In place of escort cards, guest names and tables were calligraphed onto sprigs of geranium leaves and gathered at a teak potting table against our antique black swan fountain. In place of a photo booth, our antique pagoda aviary, home to two bronze love cranes, became a vignette guests nicknamed the love jail.
The details I will never forget
Tables wore custom ivory silk faille with inverted pleats and button detailing, anchored by stone jardinieres planted with elephant ears, caladiums, and ferns, bursting with grapes and dotted with taxidermy butterflies. Our head table, an antique green marble table from Zeze Found, was set with our own wedding china: hand-painted passionflower plates and etched lily-of-the-valley glassware from Talmaris in Paris, fluted Baccarat stemware, and antique Gorham lily silver. The passionflower napkin rings were hand-embroidered by the English embroiderer Jenny Adin Christie, who took our commission while simultaneously completing work for King Charles’s coronation.
The cake carried the most meaning. Ron Ben-Israel painted an ombre blue confection with florals and insects after a vintage Hermes scarf my grandmother had given me years earlier; we discovered only afterward that Hermes released the design the year I was born. She had passed just months before the wedding, so the cake was chocolate with orange buttercream, her favorite, and a note at the bottom of the menu told her story. We kept it a surprise for her seven children, my mother the youngest among them, and it became one of the most quietly emotional moments of the evening.
A light rain was falling as we left, to a blue convertible Bentley filled with calla lilies. Brandon drove us along the Battery with the top down, and we rode in complete silence, partly from exhaustion, partly from absolute bliss. There was nothing left to say. We had the wedding of our dreams.
Photography by Anne Rhett. Florals by Putnam Flowers. Stationery by Stephanie Fishwick and Ellen Weldon Design. Draping by Veil. Catering by Cru Catering. Cake by Ron Ben-Israel. Music by Kiral Artists. You can see the full feature in Over the Moon, and more of the celebration in the wedding portfolio.
Designing your own celebration
It was, in the end, the most personal project I will ever design, and the truest expression of how I think about celebration: one idea, held all the way through, from the first envelope to the last dance. If you’re planning a wedding in Charleston, I would be honored to hear about it, as your Charleston wedding planner.
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