NY ARCHITECTS DESIGN DREAM HOME AND DREAM WEDDING

From the Bride: When Daniel and I finally decided to have a wedding (as opposed to running off together and eloping!), we knew exactly the kind of wedding we wanted: an intimate outdoor celebration, simple but elegant, with great food and music, and our closest family and friends. We knew we wanted to get married at a house, where we could gather for the entire weekend, and since we're both architects, we wanted a place with some architectural charm. But we have family all over, and choosing a city and venue felt incredibly daunting, so for a while we were stuck... It just so happened that as we were brainstorming, we were also starting construction on our very first project as our own architecture firm - a house for Daniel's father on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The house sits on a beautiful waterfront property, and one day as I was looking out at the water, I had this sudden vision of us getting married right on that spot, and immediately the emotions and ideas started pouring in, and I ran over to tell Daniel my crazy thought. It felt like an epiphany - we had worked so hard to design this home, and I knew it would be the perfect symbol of the start of our journey together. It did take some convincing, because the house was so far from done, but we picked a date in late October hoping it would give us plenty of leeway to finish, and we set to work.

Despite having a lot on our plates, we couldn't help DIY-ing so much of the event - we came up with an early fall palette that we pulled from the house and property, and we used the modern style of the house as inspiration for the event design. We even designed the invitations and letterpress printed them ourselves at a shop near our Brooklyn home. We had a blast turning the wedding into another design project we could share with each other. And all the personal touches made the wedding day feel so magical and unique to us. It was incredible to see so many months of work, on both the house and the wedding, come together in such a momentous way. The day itself was beautiful - lightly overcast and warm for late October. Daniel had dreamed of sailing on the river during cocktail hour, and we had rented a beautiful sailboat to go out on. We had a 6-piece band (Carte Blanche) play the most wonderful vintage jazz as we dined under a sailcloth tent by the water, and we ended dinner with a video we had made telling the story of our relationship. Finally, we danced under the stars, and a few of us even jumped in the freezing cold pool! Daniel and I felt nothing but euphoria the whole day, and we'd relive it every year if we could! It was definitely one of the best days of our lives.

Please find the instagrams of all the amazing vendors at the end of the blog! :)

From the photographer: I was super excited when I heard about Erika and Daniel’s project. I also was wondering why they would hire me out of all the super amazing wedding photographers to pick from. They had seen on my other photography site (www.jdswiger.com) that I recently begin shooting architecture photos and they were interested in getting some shots of their new project. I arrived in Maryland a few days out before the wedding and the day before the wedding I woke up at 430am for the best light to capture some great photos. Here are the architectural shots I captured:

John David