Oh how I love understated elegance. Lucky for me (and you) this cozy Danish wedding by No Eye Has Seen Photography serves up a delightful amount of just that through all the thoughtful and personal details. Let’s see, a cake made by the bride’s mother that took five days, a castle to share with their guests for the event, nods to their culture and love story, and a lovely blogger bride’s vision of a perfect wedding brought to life – I’d say this wedding is understated in the best possible way. For even more cozy, be sure to check out the full gallery of goodness.
click here for the full wedding gallery!
From the Bride…We knew from the beginning that we wanted our wedding to be cozy and intimate, and that it should reflect us as a couple. Planning this wedding forced us into an adventure of really getting to know ourselves, and extracting what was essentially us from the expectations that surrounded us and the traditions that surrounds a wedding. To sum it up in two words, we went for a “cozy elegance”, mixing elements of Danish and the Mediterranean, and keeping a balance between vintage and Scandinavian modern.
We didn’t feel the need to have the grandest of cakes, or the most spectacular of flowers – instead, we liked things to be understated and personal, pretty and feminine and chose a very simple palette of white, pink, charcoal grey and black. Our wedding was quite small with only 40 of our closest family and friends for the dinner and party. This is small even in Danish standards, where the number of guests at wedding will usually lie somewhere between 60 and 100. An intimate wedding, we felt, made it all that much more exclusive, and gave us the time to talk to our guests, some of which had travelled from other countries. We chose Sophienberg Castle as our venue because it was everything we wanted – it was small enough to give that cosy atmosphere which we were looking for, had a beautiful view over the sea and a park in the back for our guests to enjoy – and we were able to rent the whole castle for ourselves. With its gleaming white exterior and sparkling black roof, it also has a very timeless Danish, architectural style. We wanted our guests to feel that they entered a cocoon for a day in which we could create new memories together.
My mum had spent 5 days prior to our wedding making the wedding cake from scratch, which we served immediately after the ceremony. The cake consisted of fruit filling with a white chocolate layer over the entire top. We served cake and pink cremant from century old wooden boats, while we sailed down a romantic canal together with our guests. After the boat ride, Thomas and I left to get our portrait pictures taken while our guests drove up to the castle and got ready for dinner. We had chosen Alicia from No Eye Has Seen Photography to photograph our day, because she has a style which we really liked – a great balance between edgy and romantic, and a very different style from most wedding photographers in Denmark. Our engagement session with her the August prior to the wedding proved to us that she could make us look good in pictures even though we usually feel very awkward in front of a camera, and she is amazing at directing us and trying out many different things that we would never have thought of ourselves. The pictures really speak for Alicias talent – we didn’t believe we could look so good!
In many ways, our wedding was quite reflective of what would be expected at a Danish wedding, such as having homemade goods like the cake and stationery. We also followed the Danish traditions of ripping the veil and cutting the groom’s socks, and dancing the bridal waltz before midnight. However, we felt it was important to sprinkle in some Mediterranean atmosphere too. I lived most of my life in Italy, and we were engaged in Barcelona in Spain; and we dream of one day buying an apartment in Paris, having had our favorite holidays there. We had an acoustic guitarist play background music throughout the dinner and also the bridal waltz. We set up long, narrow tables in 2 long rows so assimilate an Italian family dinner. My parents imported “Brutti e Buoni”, light almond and vanilla cookies which were invented a century ago in the area where I was brought up in Italy. It was quite important to me that my dress and the shoes were designed by a native of one of these countries, and ended up with a dress and shoes by Spanish designers Enzoani and Pedro Garcia.
Throughout the planning process however, we drew a lot of inspiration from American wedding blogs such as Style Me Pretty. By bringing in elements such as a photobooth, the butterfly escort cards, and a shrug from Etsy which we had read about on American sites, we incorporated elements that really made our wedding stand out to our guests. During our planning process, I got inspired to start my own wedding blog, Pretty Chic Blog which is the only one of its kind in Denmark, hoping to be able to inspire other Danish brides with ideas on how to make their own wedding personal and a reflection of themselves.
Photography: Alicia Candelora of No Eye Has Seen Photography / Reception Location: Sophienberg Castle / Shoes: Pedro Garcia / Dress: Blue by Enzoani / Knitted shrug: Deniz’s shop at Etsy / Photobooth: Think Photography