Ellie + Tim by Monique Bianca - Together Journal

We opted for luxe fabrics, patterned greens, with pops of orange and cream.

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

Tim and I have been together for 6 years, and we live in San Francisco, California. I am a California native – born in San Francisco and raised in Silicon Valley, while Tim is a later California convert from Maryland on the East Coast of the US. We love spending time with our ample communities, sharing laughs, travelling, and enjoying all that the outdoors and beautiful Bay Area weather have to offer us. We both love to golf, ski, play tennis, and explore. We love the arts – though we both love visiting museums and the beauty of architecture, I additionally lean into the performing art (as an ex-actor in my youth, I love the theatre, ballet, and the opera), while Tim loves to bird watch. I’m an avid reader, and Tim keeps me up to date on all of the current events I don’t always have time to update myself on. We both love word puzzles and crosswords – Tim can do a Saturday New York Times in under four minutes!

I work as the Head of Commercial for a clinical gut health company called Ayble, and Tim is a talented software engineer for an outdoor sports company called Curated. In my spare time, I work to find interesting early stage healthcare investments for Necessary Ventures, take on a number of interior design projects across the country and write a fashion blog. Tim is a lifelong sailor and famed amongst friends for being the best amateur cook anyone has ever met. We love to travel, spend time in the mountains, go on long drives on the California coast, and listen to live music.

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

Tim and I met when he invited a mutual friend to watch an American football game, and she invited me. I sat down right next to him, and we started chatting – it turned out we had a lot in common! We went to a few events over the coming weeks, but when he asked me out, I told him I wasn’t looking for a relationship. He was incredibly patient with me, and a year later, I finally came around. Tim is thoughtful, eloquent, and incisive. He is whip-smart, a great listener, and has a deep curiosity about how the world works. It was immediately apparent that we thought the same way, shared many of the same beliefs, and enjoyed working through meaty philosophical problems in the same way. Tim is the smartest, sharpest kind of funny, kind hearted, and loves his family.

When did you first realise that this was someone you’d like to spend the rest of your life with?

Since we had known each other for a full year before we started dating, the first year moved fast: it had been clear since day 1 that Tim wanted to marry me, and it didn’t take long for me to realise I couldn’t imagine a world without him. Every moment since has been a confirmation for us both – there is no one else we would rather grow with, laugh with, and spend life with.

Was there a proposal? Tell us a little about it…

Tim and I travel frequently for live music, and one of our friends was opening up for Rufus du Sol on their international shows. With one of the shows in Santa Barbara, a sleepy, elegant beachside town in Southern California, Tim and I made the drive down on Friday morning for a Saturday show. When we travel to new places, we often visit the botanical gardens: we both love flowers, and Tim is an avid bird watcher. When we arrived in Santa Barbara, we took a stroll around their famed botanical gardens, which ended on a hill in the middle of a rose garden, where Tim came to one knee and proposed. We were ecstatic for the rest of the day – checking into the Belmond el Encanto by the sea, drinking champagne and celebrating. The next day, our friends joined us for the show and a celebration that was a perfect representation of our relationship: fun and loving and full of dancing and community.

Tell us about the vision you had for the mood or style of your wedding.

I am a firm believer in leaning into the context you’re provided: everything chosen stylistically for a wedding or event needs to be designed and created in concert with the space it exists within. That, for us, meant waiting to choose a location ahead of a style for the weekend. Initially, Tim and I loved the idea of an international wedding in a beautiful castle somewhere in France. As we worked through our priorities for the wedding, we kept falling back to prioritizing all of our loved ones being able to attend and making the guest experience as easy as possible. We chose Sonoma for a number of reasons: wine country holds a special place in my heart as I collect wine, and we’ve spent many weekends up tasting in the area. Sonoma is one of the closest places to an international airport within wine country, making it slightly easier for guests who flew into San Francisco, and when we visited Cornerstone we simply fell in love with the variety of beautiful gardens. We wanted to use the weekend as an opportunity to share one of our favourite parts of the state with our friends and family from out of town: mouth-watering wines, delicious food, gorgeous views with mountains and fields and florals, and the laid-back culture so endemic to Northern California. To lean into this, we chose textures, florals, rentals, and designs that expressed the peach sunsets, pale green rolling hills, and casual elegance of wine country. We steered away from minimalism, instead opting for luxe fabrics, patterned greens, with pops of orange and cream.

What was one element you were happy to splurge on?

One of the items we didn’t expect to be such a hit was the food – we’ve never heard so many compliments on wedding food: from the rehearsal, through the dinner, the night off, all the way through brunch on Sunday. The catering through the venue wasn’t cheap but well worth it – we were thrilled to provide an opportunity for our out-of-town guests to experience fresh, seasonal Northern California dining at its finest. Folktable is a Bib Gourmand restaurant near the venue and was a perfect choice for the food we’ll all remember for years.

Tim and I love to travel, so the biggest splurge was probably our monthlong honeymoon to Africa!

Did anything happen on your wedding day that you laugh about in hindsight (even if it was stressful at the time)?

Everyone warned us that the day would go so fast we would nearly miss it – and they were all right! We tried our hardest to slow the day down – taking every second we could to step back into our bodies and notice every detail around us. Despite our best efforts, the weekend still went by in a flash! We were prepared for anything: rain, a disagreement among guests, a slip-up in a speech, but to our surprise, everything went off completely flawlessly. Even the morning of before the girls came over for hair and makeup was as peaceful as they come: a long bath, followed by morning buns and iced lattes at the table in our suite, our last meal together as fiancés.

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

The dress was a collaborative effort between me and Helen Miller, a talented local designer in San Francisco. I first visited the salon as a fluke: I had my eyes on a few dresses from the New York and Los Angeles boutiques that I was deciding between. A few of my dearest friends made an appointment for the group of us at Helen Miller: they didn’t want to miss out on all of the fun just because I had done the bulk of my wedding dress shopping elsewhere. The moment I tried on the base dress: a creamy, tailored satin dress embossed with flower outlines with a gorgeous neckline – I knew it was the one. Over the course of a few months, I worked with Helen and her team to add custom sleeves and create an entirely custom veil. I was particularly proud of how everything turned out – and cherished every moment in the perfect wedding outfit. P.S. if you were wondering, yes, it did have pockets!

As an interior designer, I love finding ways to integrate small details into a larger space, and I wanted textured florals to flow through each outfit. During the rehearsal dinner, I wore a vintage beaded bag from the 1920s that my mother-in-law lovingly restored, along with a floral applique dress from Self Portrait. My wedding day outfit – the dress with delicate florals embossed throughout, along with my 3D applique floral veil – tied in with a Sau Lee dress that turned me into a flower: the neckline imitating petals floating away from my body. Sunday, I wore a vintage Ralph Lauren silk and lace floral dress from the 1990s, with earrings from Le Couronnes de Victoire that echoed the sleeves on my rehearsal dinner dress.

As someone who loves fashion (I write about fashion theory and sustainability), choosing outfits for an important day was incredibly challenging. There are endless directions you can choose to go in, but I feel confident in the decisions I made and think I’ll look back on them as timeless and very personal.