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An Anglo-American Enzoani bride for an English country garden Jewish wedding at Northbrook Park, Farnham, Surrey UK

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One of the best ‘how we met’ stories ever to have graced these pages is about to unfold before your very eyes. I’ll let the bride, Danielle, regale the full tale, but essentially the bride and groom’s parents were friends before these two were even born and their mothers fell pregnant at the same time. Born just six days apart, the bride and groom essentially knew each other from birth and what makes this Jewish wedding so very special is that so many of the guests had known both the bride and groom since the day they were born and had seen them grow up together — and apart (Danielle and her family moved to Florida when she was six) — and then together again!

No surprise then that this wonderful wedding is all about celebrating family with a closeness and an intimacy that I’m sure was felt intensely by every guest. So many wonderful touches, but one of my favourite is Danielle and Adam’s chuppah idea:

As the chuppah symbolises the four walls of a Jewish home, we wanted our family and friends to help us build this ‘home’. We asked all the ladies to pick out a rose and place it within the chuppah and hopefully while they did so they also made a wish for us and our marriage.”

I’m also very much liking Danielle’s Enzoani dress and those wonderful mismatched bridesmaids complete with baby’s breath flower crowns  — the perfect accompaniment to that scenic backdrop of blue skies and the Great British countryside.

Everything about this beautifully designed wedding at the gorgeous Northbrook Park is like viewing canned happiness and fun! From the personalised ushers’ pants(!) to the abundance of floral prettiness provided by Fairynuff Flowers to the Marryaoke and the “family style” Mediterranean cuisine by Eat Me. It all made for a rustic, relaxed feel of a family Shabbat dinner with people chatting and sharing food as if they had known each other for years! Oh wait, many of the guests did!

Enjoy this one peeps — the day was photographed perfectly by Cotton Candy — a duo of fun, fabulous women who did a brilliant job of capturing all the love and details.

English Country Garden Jewish Wedding Northbrook ParkEnglish Country Garden Jewish Wedding Northbrook Park
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A Ritva Westenius bride for a city-chic Interfaith Jewish Wedding at One Marylebone, Central London, UK

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Today’s wedding from One Marylebone in the heart of London, is a masterclass in how to ensure your guests enjoy your big day. In particular, it’s an absolute must-read for anyone planning a mixed faith wedding. Lucy’s report is long — there’s no denying it — but it’s brilliantly written and very much worth scrutinising, particularly the section on how she and Matt developed and personalised their ceremony. It’s clear that Lucy’s Jewish faith is culturally and religiously of deep significance to her, and she and Matt (who’s taken to her Jewish-ness like a duck to water!) incorporated so many symbolic and personal details into their celebration.

And I love this…Six weeks before the big day they invited all of Matt’s friends over to their flat, and hosted a small Israeli dancing lesson as many of Matt’s friends had never attended a Jewish wedding before. Such a brilliant and fun idea!  As Lucy says, “while there is nothing that can prepare you for the sheer madness of running in circles and being thrown up in the air — it was great that the boys had a vague idea of what was going on so that on the day they knew how to get stuck in!”

The attention to their guests enjoyment didn’t stop there… Lucy and Matt really wanted to let their guests know how happy they were that they were there to share their big day with them. So they hand-wrote 200 (yes 200!) individual cards so that each guest had a personal note waiting for them on their place at the table.

Our bride and groom look impeccable stylish — Lucy in a beautifully cut Ritva Westenius gown, and Matt in a three piece suit by Hackett. And whilst we’re talking fashion can I just be frivolous and say that I am loving the gals’ personalised sports bras!

Photography is by Jez Dickson whose work I’m delighted to be featuring on the blog today.

One Marylebone Wedding
how we met

Lucy, the Bride: Matt and I met in the summer of 2010, at a club in Putney. We both had other plans, and as two staunch North Londoners neither of us were particularly enamoured with the idea of an evening so far from home! I spotted Matt on the dancefloor and danced near him, within a matter of minutes he had offered to buy me a drink — we sat in the corner nursing a single drink for the next three hours and had our first official date the next day.

On the Sunday he rang his mother and told her that he had met the woman he wanted to marry — she politely reminded him that I may not necessarily feel the same way after one short meeting. Nonetheless, 6 dates and 10 days later he asked me if I would be his girlfriend, after 4 years of dating he asked me to marry him and then 15 months after that we walked down the aisle!

We have never stopped talking or loving spending time with each other — and going south of the river that one night could not have been more worthwhile! Both of us are complete chatterboxes and one of the questions that everyone always asks us is who speaks when we get home? How do either of us get a word in edgeways? But somehow we’ve managed to find the one person that we can sit in silence with.

One Marylebone Wedding
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Sani & Mike | Chinese-Jewish Wedding with an ‘Adventure Through London’ theme at Ranger’s House and RSA House, London, UK

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Wow. Like… WOW.

That’s pretty much all I said for five  minutes  when Sani & Mike’s Chinese / Jewish (can I say  ‘Chewish’?!) wedding landed in my inbox. It’s the perfect first real wedding  to kick off  2016 with as it epitomises the STG mantra of your Jewish wedding day, your way. So for Sani & Mike  that meant  peking duck, Jewish wedding traditions,  a Taiwanese tea ceremony, honey cake, table tennis, street feast food stalls,  table tennis, a boat trip down the Thames, and so many  more ideas that reflected them both.

This is a  particularly inspiring post for couples planning a wedding that combines two different cultures — it’ll give you the confidence to plan exactly the kind of  wedding that feels right for you. On a frivolous note, Sani and Mike  totally nailed their red colour scheme (red is the traditional colour of good luck in Taiwanese weddings) so if you’re looking to thread a specific colour through your big day, you’ll be  inspired by lots of their ideas.

I also absolutely LOVE  that they  devised an  ‘adventure through London’ for their wedding guests (read the bride’s  wedding report below for more on that!). After the ‘London escapade’ part to their day, Sani and Mike chose the vaults at central London’s  RSA House  for their party venue. I’m a huge fan of RSA House as it has a plethora of beautiful traditional spaces, but you can get entirely  creative with their ‘underground chamber’ vaults too. Sani, the  Bride, explains:

We wanted to have  a bit of festival feel across the vault spaces… so the guests could pick and choose what they wanted to do, be it playing table tennis, singing karaoke with the  Rockaoke  live band, dancing, or watching England vs. Wales rugby on an iPad by the bar.”

Let me hand  you over to Sani  now for her  full report, exquisitely documented by the hugely talented Andrew Billington, and wish  ×ž×–ל טוב and 恭喜 to the Bride  and Groom!

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how we met

Sani, the Bride: Mike and I have been friends for years, having been introduced by mutual friends, just after university about eight years ago. We got to know each other through parties and mutual friends, but gradually got closer over the years, and then played in a  band together which resulted in spending even more time in each others company.

It definitely was not love at first sight and we used to genuinely annoy the hell out of each other and have massive shouting matches, storming out of rooms, slamming doors and calling each other all sorts of names! In fact, if you had told either of us four years ago that we’d end up marrying each other, you would have been declared mad and laughed out of the room.

Mike and I both had different partners throughout our friendship but I guess all that bickering, winding each other up and arguing, spending so much time together, living on top of each other in the lead up to gigs and band recordings, resulted in a closeness which we then finally and very reluctantly realised was love. Needless to say, most of our close friends were not that surprised and if anything, relieved that all the public shouting matches have stopped since we got together!

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A Monique Lhuillier bride for a city chic Jewish wedding at Bloomsbury Ballroom, London, UK

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Not only is today’s bride, Dana, a big fan of Smashing The Glass (I always love to hear that!) she also found her super talented florist, Gloria Baker, through the blog, and my goodness, what a breathtaking chuppah Gloria created. It’s a chuppah to die for. Anyone that’s after a dreamy, romantic, floral look should get their pinterest boards at the ready, and if not, get all old school with a notepad and pen — seriously it’s THAT good.

Dana and Jacob married at central London’s Bloomsbury Ballroom and they definitely achieved their aim of creating the greatest party of their lives. A massive 80% of their guests flew in from abroad and everyone partied so hard you just knew they weren’t working the following day! From personalised masks of Dana and Jacob, to flip flop favours, photo booths, and glasses emblazoned with ‘Dana and Jacob’, every dance floor detail was thought of.

I haven’t even mentioned Dana’s epic gown yet.. She wore ‘Sarah’ by Monique Lhuillier but she went a step further and got one of the wonderful seamstresses at Browns Bride to create a detachable skirt so that she could completely change up her look for the ceremony and the party. Brilliant!

As with almost every Jewish wedding ceremony, theirs was steeped in tradition and ritual, and they managed to successfully combine both Ashkenazi and Sephardi wedding traditions to reflect both their heritages. They also made the decision not to see or talk to each other for an entire week before the wedding! This is one of my favourite religious Jewish wedding traditions, but one that I rarely see carried out (for the full week) these days.

All the images and film are by Shedrin & Rubi, who Dana and Jacob flew in all the way from Israel.

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A super cool and creative, colourful Jewish wedding at Middle Street Synagogue, and The Grand, Brighton, UK

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Oh my goodness. Where on earth do I start with this wedding?! It’s such fun, and it’s just bursting at the seams with creative details that will make you squeal. Seriously — it’s that good!

There are gold pineapples, the most exquisitely branded stationery (all designed by the bride), an enchanting alternative to a guest book, bridesmaids in the most epic shade of coral, a personalised head-in-hole board (a must-have when your wedding is by the English seaside!) and beautifully designed welcome bag totes (again designed by bride) filled with Brighton Rock, fish & chips shaped crackers, and all sorts of other seaside-themed treats.

It’s clear from looking at all of the delicious details in this big day that Danielle poured her heart and soul into all of the planning. Everything was evidently created with the greatest care and love, and, not surprisingly, her wedding features some of my much-loved Smashing Suppliers doing an AMAZING job.

I’m talking about Jonny Mosesson (their incredible chazan under the chuppah —who also was the chazan at my wedding!) and Stephanie Allin, Danielle’s sensational wedding dress designer, who bizarrely enough, designed my wedding dress too! Danielle says, “I hope that anyone reading this who likes the sound of anything we did gets in touch with our vendors because they made our day so incredible — they were absolutely brilliant.”

This wedding is literally the perfect mix of Jewish tradition and super cool creativity and I think you’re going to love it. I certainly did!

Oh, and their ‘How We Met’ story is beyond… their mums set them up!!

All of the laughter was captured by one of my favourite photographers, Kristian Leven, making a very welcome debut on STG today. 

Take it away Danielle!

Jewish wedding Brighton
how we met

Our mums set us up. Yes, it’s true!

They knew each other when they were kids growing up in Leeds and then happened to be seated together at a wedding two years ago. They figured out that they both had kids the same age. Who were single. My mum had had a few too many cocktails and so Gideon’s mum, someone who will never take no for an answer, ended up going home with my phone number! When I spoke to my mum about the wedding the next day, she never mentioned it because she never thought he would call. And he didn’t. But he texted! And the rest is history!

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