Elegant San Francisco Wedding at the St. Francis Yacht Club

Elizabeth Greene
December 4, 2014
Categories: Real Weddings, Traditional Elegance

I have a feeling I know what Tony Bennett meant when he proclaimed that he left his heart in San Francisco. This classic San Fran affair radiates elegance and glamour and with Huckleberry Karen Designs creating floral magic, my heart is left swooning. Carmen Holt captured every picture perfect moment and I won’t be leaving this gallery anytime soon.

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From The Bride…In April 2010, I had tickets to the San Francisco Giant’s game. Not knowing a thing about the Giant’s, I decided to check it out and see them in action. Prior to the game, I went to dinner at a nearby bar, Pete’s Tavern, and that is where I met Steven. We ended up talking all night, and needless to say, I never made it into the game!

Throughout the years, we fell in love and built our lives with the backdrop of San Francisco. When we got engaged, there was no question that we would be married in our beloved city. After looking at a few venues, we decided on the St. Francis Yacht Club due to the breathtaking views of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz.

When we sat down to plan our wedding, we both agreed that our number one goal was for everyone to have a fun and memorable night. We are both avid music lovers, so when we met with Andrew Verducci, we knew he was the one to help bring our vision to life. We had themes for every part of the evening to showcase our eclectic taste in music. For example, cocktail hour hailed “Yacht Rock” music from Hall and Oates to The Doobie Brothers. Dinner was filled with 90’s R&B love songs from Babyface, New Edition, and K-Ci & JoJo, and dancing was Top 40 music with Lil Jon, Pink, and Flo Rida bouncing off the walls all night long. Steven’s groomsman also rapped “Rapper’s Delight” in its entirety, which was one of the highlights of the evening!

Designing and planning a wedding was such a great process for us. Unlike some brides, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. I spent my nights scouring wedding blogs and building Pinterest boards for inspiration. I wanted to incorporate some DIY elements to personalize our wedding, so I took on the daunting task of making my own pom poms (thank you Martha Stewart for the tutorial), escort cards, wooden signs, photobooth backdrop, and to-go bags for the dessert bar. My husband was nervous about all these DIY ideas, but I was determined to do them myself, even if it meant only a few hours of sleep each night. Of all the projects, the hardest by far was the animal escort cards. I bought plastic animals online, spray painted them gold, and painstakingly cut a slit in each animal’s back using a small hand saw (just to be clear, I did about 200 of these). A lot of blisters resulted in this project, but it was definitely a labor of love and in the end, it was worth seeing everything come to fruition.

A few people asked what our wedding colors were, and to be honest, we didn’t really have a particular color scheme. However, we knew we wanted to keep a clean palette with golds, navys, blacks, and creams and have our amazing florals inject pops of color throughout the event space.

When it came to dessert, we wanted to give our guests a variety of options and offered them copious amounts of lemon bars, whoopie pies, seven layer bars, chocolate chip/sugar cookies, brownies, and some of our favorite candy. And if that wasn’t enough, we also had a small two tier peanut butter flavored funfetti cake decorated in Giant’s colors, topped with personalized figurines of ourselves donning Giants gear.

We danced non-stop and closed the night with none other than the Giant’s anthem: “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” by Journey. It is true what they say: your wedding day will not go according to plan. We had a few minor bumps but the most incredible feeling was experiencing the pure love and happiness that surrounded us that day. To us, it was absolutely perfect.