Chloe + Anish by M. Felt Photography

We pulled a lot of the colours from the Southern Utah landscape

Tell us a little about yourselves, what you do, what you love…

We live in New York City, although neither of us is originally from there: Chloe grew up in Salt Lake City, and Anish was born in India and grew up in Singapore. We’ve both moved around quite a bit for work and, somewhat unexpectedly, now work together too. Anish runs a technology company, and Chloe leads its corporate marketing – a fun adventure we definitely didn’t anticipate when we met.

We’re both career-oriented, but also have an almost unreasonable number of hobbies. Anish loves tennis and squash, Chloe loves volleyball and running, and together we ski, scuba dive, and, most of all, love doing anything with our friends. We both tend to throw ourselves fully into whatever we care about, whether it’s a career chapter, a project, or a new hobby we’ve suddenly become a little too obsessed with.

We come from different cultural backgrounds, but realised early on that our fundamental values were remarkably similar: family and close friends come first, community is worth investing in, and knowing where you come from doesn’t preclude building a life that looks entirely your own.

How/where/when did you meet – and what were your first impressions?

We met in 2016 in LA, when Chloe was living in LA and Anish was living in San Francisco. Anish came down for a Caribou and Four Tet show, and the night before, he and some friends heard about a birthday party for a friend of a friend and decided to tag along.

Chloe noticed Anish pretty quickly – between the bright pink kurta and his funky dance moves, he was hard to miss. She thought he was cute and wanted to talk to him, but wasn’t quite confident enough to make the first move. As it turned out, Anish had noticed Chloe too and was equally interested. Fortunately, a now-married couple we’re still friends with picked up on what was happening and took it upon themselves to play wing-people, eventually orchestrating an “after-party” that conveniently consisted of just the four of us.

At the end of the night, we exchanged numbers and discovered that we already had each other saved in our phones as “Anish Hinge” and “Chloe Hinge.” We’d matched on Hinge the year before and messaged for a while, but busy work schedules got in the way and we’d fallen out of touch.

It felt pretty serendipitous to meet again completely by chance a year later. Apparently we just needed the universe – and two persistent friends – to give us another shot. We started dating soon after.

What styling and visual elements worked best for you? (could be things, the florals, particular hire products or your marquee, etc., something the stylist created or simply just the scenic beauty of your location or the existing design of your venue).

The setting was really the starting point for everything. Best Friends Animal Sanctuary is surrounded by red-rock cliffs, desert brush, and huge expanses of sky, and we wanted the wedding to feel like it belonged there rather than competing with it.

We pulled a lot of the colours from the Southern Utah landscape, then mixed in brighter pinks, blues, and yellows to make things feel a little more playful and eclectic. We wanted everything to feel special, but not overly formal or precious. That carried through to the smaller details – funky typography, colourful mismatched plates and glassware, whimsical illustrations, and florals that felt at home against the desert.

We took the same approach to what everyone wore. Rather than giving guests a traditional dress code, we simply said “celebratory” and let them interpret it. We ended up with colourful dresses, saris, bolo ties, cowboy boots, light suits, fringe jackets, and plenty of combinations we never could have prescribed ourselves.

Ultimately, the best visual element was the place itself. Everything else was really about complementing it while still making the weekend feel like us.

What did you enjoy most about the planning process, and do you have any tips for couples starting their wedding planning journey?

We went into wedding planning thinking we didn’t care much about traditional wedding details, so surely we wouldn’t get too stressed about them. That turned out to be only partially true. Once we could picture all our favourite people together in a place we loved, we found ourselves caring about the little things much more than expected.
Our biggest advice is to keep coming back to your north star. Chloe especially could get lost in the details, so we periodically asked ourselves: If this doesn’t transpire, will the wedding feel incomplete? Usually, the answer was no.

At the same time, some seemingly frivolous details became our favourites because they meant something to us. We tracked down a particular vermouth a friend had introduced us to for the Negronis and served a tiny non-alcoholic wine brand we’d discovered at a tasting. Neither was necessary, but both made the weekend feel more like us.

Those were also the parts of planning we enjoyed most: curating playlists, choosing the menus and drinks, and coming up with details our friends would appreciate. Instead of numbers, we named the dinner tables after silly disagreements we’ve had over the years – whether anchovies are gross, whether Crocs are cute, etc. They became conversation starters, and when we visited each table, we could ask which side everyone had landed on.

There are endless decisions you can make when planning a wedding. We found it helpful to focus on the ones that represented us, our community, or the experience we wanted everyone to have.

Tell us about your vendors. Were there any standout suppliers you would like to make special mention of?

We got incredibly lucky with our vendors. Our planner, Laura from Forevermore Events, took Chloe’s approximately one million ideas in stride and made so many of them happen – even when that meant things like bringing in a freezer because our reception space didn’t have a full kitchen and we were determined to serve affogatos. More importantly, she was completely calm when things inevitably went sideways. When our buses turned out to be too large for the road to the ceremony, she worked with the Best Friends team to find smaller shuttles for the last mile. We didn’t know there had been an issue until everything was already running smoothly – exactly what you want from a planner.

Best Friends was a huge part of what made the weekend special. The team genuinely cared about making it a wonderful experience, helping us find the right spaces and organise everything from puppies at the welcome party to sanctuary tours for our guests. Chloe grew up visiting and had talked about it for years, but even she loved hearing friends say afterwards, “I had no idea it would be this beautiful.” The setting is so spectacular that we could have done far less with the design and still had an incredible wedding.

We also couldn’t have been happier with McKenzie and Joey from M. Felt Photography. Photographers are with you for so many intimate and potentially stressful moments that we think it’s underrated how important it is to choose people you genuinely enjoy having around – almost like guests you would have invited anyway. They immediately put us at ease and captured the feeling of the weekend beautifully. We also wanted to spend as little time as possible away from our guests, so group photos needed to be selective and fast. That requires photographers who can kindly but assertively wrangle a distracted crowd, and McKenzie and Joey did it flawlessly.

Too many amazing vendors to thank. We got incredibly lucky.

Tell us about your main outfits, what was unique, and is there a story?

There was a little bit of intention and a lot of serendipity with both of our outfits. Chloe knew she wanted to wear vintage – she loved the idea of the dress having a past life and tries to avoid buying new where possible. She found Alex at Le Grand Strip through a Reddit thread and loved the whole process: they talked through her vision, Alex spent weeks hunting for options, and then Chloe brought her mom and two close friends for an after-hours try-on with champagne.

Chloe had imagined something very minimalist, but Alex asked her to trust her on a gold Mary McFadden couture dress that was completely different. She was right. The gold looked perfect against the Utah landscape, and Alex knew Anish was of Indian heritage and that McFadden had spent significant time in India, which influenced her designs. The dress had an Indian-Western feel that made it seem even more fitting. Chloe knew immediately – and somehow it fit without any tailoring. It was the first and only shop she visited.

Anish’s outfit came together somewhat accidentally too. He had originally planned on a light-colored suit, but increasingly felt he wanted to wear something Indian. He already had a white Indian suit for our Sunday ceremony and loved it, so once Chloe hinted that her dress wasn’t white, we realised the two worked perfectly together. In photos, they look carefully coordinated, but really, both outfits just fell into place.

Tell us about your wedding and engagement rings.

Our rings are all a little nontraditional, which feels fitting for us. Chloe’s engagement ring from Point No Point has a hexagonal, rose-cut salt-and-pepper diamond. A few friends warned that she might eventually want something more traditional, but she loved that it felt imperfect and almost ancient – a little like something out of Jurassic Park, appropriately. Point No Point also made her wedding band, using the original CAD to design it to fit perfectly around the unusual shape of the engagement ring.

Anish similarly wanted something that didn’t feel too polished or perfect. We found his band at ESQUELETO, designed by Rebecca Overmann, and loved its organic texture – almost like a river or the bark of a tree.

There was one small hiccup: in the fog of wedding planning, Chloe accidentally ordered the wrong version of Anish’s ring and didn’t realise until after it had been engraved. ESQUELETO and Rebecca generously offered to remake it for a very minimal charge.

We didn’t set out to choose rings around a common theme, but looking at them together, there clearly is one: we both gravitated toward things that felt a little imperfect, organic, and outside the norm.

What were one or two elements that were most important to you both that you were happy to spend a little more on? (food, photography, florals, the venue, your outfits?).

We couldn’t break the bank on the wedding, so we tried to be very intentional about where we spent. Southern Utah is affordable in a lot of ways, which helped, but it certainly wasn’t cheap or easy for most of our guests to get there. Once they had made that effort, we wanted them to feel well taken care of – almost like they were on vacation rather than simply travelling for a wedding. That meant prioritising the things they would actually experience – especially great food and everything that made the weekend fun – while keeping things like florals, decor, and tableware relatively simple.

We knew we wanted all of the food to be vegetarian, both because of Anish’s Hindu background and because we were getting married at an animal sanctuary, but we also wanted to make sure it was memorable and flavorful. Chef Shon was excited to work with us on a family-style menu that brought in Southeast Asian flavours to reflect Anish’s upbringing in Singapore. For the welcome party, we brought Pizzicletta in from Flagstaff – a four-hour drive away – and for Sunday, one of the most highly rated Indian restaurants in St. George. We also had chopsticks engraved in Singapore with “Best” on one and “Friends” on the other.

We took the same approach to the rest of the weekend. We surveyed our guests beforehand to see what they were interested in, then organised optional adventures based on their responses – from UTVs and slot-canyon rappelling with ROAM Outdoor to tours at Best Friends. At the welcome party, astronomers from Stellar Vista Observatory brought telescopes so everyone could experience Kanab’s incredible dark skies.

Even the welcome bags were designed around making the weekend easy, with sunscreen, electrolytes, bug spray, and other desert essentials. If people were going to travel that far to celebrate with us, we wanted to make sure the experience was worth the trip.

Was there a favourite moment (or two) that you will treasure always?

There are too many to count, so we’ll indulge ourselves with a few.

One was watching people experience Best Friends for the first time – our families seeing the ceremony space on top of the cliff during rehearsal, or guests walking into the welcome party and taking in the view. And then, at the other end of the weekend, saying goodbye to it ourselves. After everyone had left, we drove past each of the three spaces where our events had taken place and stopped to say goodbye. It was bittersweet and involved plenty of tears. We hope to have a ten-year anniversary there someday, but we knew we might not see those spaces filled with our people again for a long time.

Having our friend Fraser officiate was also incredibly special. He’s one of our closest friends and has a way with both words and people that made him exactly who we wanted standing up there with us. His ceremony was thoughtful, personal, and poetic – almost Mary Oliver or Wendell Berry-esque in the way he wove together the ancient landscape around us, the bonds of the community gathered there, and our relationship. Of course we had each other at the altar, but having Fraser there made it even more personal.

Music was a huge part of the weekend too. A family friend of Chloe’s and his girlfriend played the ceremony music and our parent dances, while other friends who are musicians practised for months to perform acoustic sets. Seeing our friends and family swaying together while our friends played was incredibly special. We also ended the night with an hour of karaoke, which led to everything from “Hey Jude” and “Pink Pony Club” to two friends who had only just met spontaneously deciding to perform a screamo song together while headbanging.

And then there was Jurassic Park. We projected the movie silently onto the red-rock cliffs behind the dance floor, and during its iconic first dinosaur reveal, our DJ perfectly timed an electronic version of the Jurassic Park theme. Everyone lost their minds, and Chloe’s friends immediately put their arms around her, knowing exactly how much she loved the movie. It was a silly moment, but also one of those reminders of how well your people know you and all the little things that make you happy.

More than any single moment, though, what we’ll remember is seeing completely different parts of our lives come together and become friends themselves. It’s hard to put into words how special it is to have almost everyone you love in one place, even if only for a weekend.

What does being married mean to you, and are there any special rituals you have that you would like to share?

For us, marriage means many things. It’s joining two families and communities while also creating a new one together. It’s knowing each other deeply – strengths, weaknesses, serious sides and silly ones – and learning how to complement each other rather than expecting the other person to be exactly like you.

Wedding planning was a good example. Chloe loves details and organisation but can get overwhelmed by decisions, especially when they affect other people. Anish is much more comfortable weighing the options and making the call. Over time, we’ve gotten better at recognising when one person’s strengths can balance the other’s.

It’s also having a permanent “yes, and” person – someone who not only accepts your weird ideas but often takes them one step further. When Chloe suggested projecting her favourite movie, Jurassic Park, onto the cliffs during the dance party, Anish suggested we also change into dinosaur costumes. We ultimately decided the costume change would take too much time away from our guests, but his instinct to take Chloe’s nerdy idea and make it even bigger is one of the fun parts of marriage.

Most importantly, marriage is a commitment to move through all the different phases of life together – accepting that there will be highs and lows and continuing to find your way through them as a team. In her vows, Chloe borrowed from Anish’s background in statistics and described life as a scatter plot: there will inevitably be points above and below the line, but we can be each other’s line of best fit, helping balance the highs and lows and keep the overall trajectory moving upward.