You’re Going To Love This Not So Typical Color Palette For This Seaside Soiree!

Samantha Melei
December 1, 2019
Categories: Real Weddings, The Blog

A San Diego, seaside wedding is exactly what we all need on the first day of December! Taking place at Scripps Seaside Forum, with a bright color palette and an array of palm trees, today’s wedding will have you daydreaming of warmer weather! With beautiful blooms by The Dainty Lion and stunning tables and views, Natalie Bray Studios had quite the day to photograph and she captured it all! Take a peek below and see how Kelsey Rae Designs, brought this day to life!

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From the Bride: A few sentences about our love story…

We met in 2014 at my best friend’s St. Patrick’s Day party through her roommate. We ended up talking to each other the entire night. From that point, we went on dates weekly. We’ve spent our relationship sharing in each other’s hobbies, passions, family and friends. From Marc’s love of playing golf and enjoying craft beer to my love of Irish dancing has led us all over the country and world to live out the most incredible experiences. At around the time of our four-year anniversary, on a cold, rainy day, Marc surprised me with lunch at the Montage Resort in Laguna Beach. Shortly after, we made our way to the hotel balcony, completely secluded and he proposed. We later visited a Dana Point restaurant to continue soaking up the moment and enjoy some live music, but I was surprised again with an enthusiastic welcome from our families.

How did you pick venue?

Hours and hours of research but we eventually settled in narrowing our venue search to San Diego because 1) we love it there and 2) it was really important for us that we selected an area that our family and friends, especially those traveling from out-of-state and out of the country, could share in some of our favorite places as well as see the beauty and variety of California. We knew we wanted to get married in church and (ideally) find a reception venue with an ocean-view to have an outdoor dinner. We committed to researching venues available in the summer season for the great weather and to not impact our relatives with young kids and their school schedules.

We came across Scripps Seaside Forum and knew we found our reception venue. We loved that it was a blank slate, an ocean-view venue that wasn’t a hotel and thus had more privacy. It was also a priority that the venue had an indoor space in case the weather didn’t permit an outdoor reception. We were only able to book our date because a couple released their hold for a Sunday date. Around the same time, we found a church we loved, Our Lady of the Rosary, in Little Italy (our favorite area of San Diego). Their website didn’t explicitly state no Sunday ceremonies, which Catholic churches are notorious for. After writing a letter to the priest and meeting the deacon, we were able to schedule our marriage ceremony!

Dress choice?

I discovered the dress during my first dress shopping experience, at Kinsley James Couture Bridal. I fell in love with a Liz Martinez dress for its delicate 3D floral detailing in the bodice and crystal beads on the skirt. However, the original bodice was very revealing, especially for a church ceremony. After visiting tons of other bridal stores, I came back to Kinsley James during a Liz Martinez trunk show, met the designer (who is so sweet and generous) and I tried on the dress again. By this time we confirmed our venues, which was a big determinate of picking the dress style. I still loved the same dress from the first visit and was able to do a custom design using the shape of another one of Liz’s dresses for the bodice and added detachable cap sleeves to wear for the ceremony. A huge part of my making my wedding dress vision a reality was the seamstress and owner of Folklore Dress Studio, Lara Prawat.

Design ideas

For the church, we wanted to maintain it’s authenticity (plus it was so intrinsically beautiful already) so we opted out of any decor. This also allowed more room in our budget to use for the reception venue. For the reception venue, we loved that it was a blank slate. The overall design vision was simple, modern, coastal elegance that exuded joy. We felt colors of the sunset would be the perfect color scheme to illustrate our joy and complement a beach-side wedding.

Learnings from the wedding:

There are soooo many! Finding the right vendors predicts the success of the wedding because the reception space was a venue only rental, we needed to select every vendor for every element of the wedding. We had a selection of about 15 caterers to choose from that the reception venue allowed, but everyone else was found through researching online. We looked for vendors that had experience with our venue. A coincidental bonus was finding vendors who have also worked together. We set our priorities and selected the best vendors we could afford because we didn’t want any pre-wedding planning stress to leak through to our wedding day. It was very important to us that our families and friends were not responsible for anything at the wedding. We wanted everyone to soak in the day, be present and not worry about setting up or tearing down the venue (especially since we were having a mini-destination wedding). Hiring a full planner was outside of our budget but thankfully Kelsey Rae Designs offered month-of coordination and that was game-changing. On the day of the wedding, the only thing our family and friends had to worry about was where to keep their tissues. Be gracious to your vendors! Yes, you’re paying for their service but they work extremely hard to ensure your day is as you envisioned it.

Venue search:

Finding a church and reception venue that both connected with us and was available on the same day was the most challenging and stressful part of the wedding planning journey. All I can say is that we were lucky that our dream venues ended up being available.

Wedding dress shopping:

Try on every silhouette because you really don’t know how it will frame your shape until you do. If you want to avoid trying on tons of dresses (like I did), decide on the silhouette early on. The variety of dresses is endless but narrowing down the silhouette first makes it easier to then narrow down the neckline, then the fabric, then the detailing. If you decide to make changes from the original dress, don’t expect that it will arrive as you envisioned it. It was very hard to commit to paying for a dress that wasn’t what I tried on. Things do get lost in translation and there were many changes that were needed to work through with the seamstress. But after several fittings, the vision came to life.

Keep in mind how your guests (and vendors) will experience the day. Ask yourself a lot of questions: How will people travel to different venues? Is there free parking nearby (especially if located in the city)? Restroom amenities? Are your dining chairs comfortable? Do you need to rent high chairs? There are so many little details to consider. Everyone will tell you to just do what the two of you want, but we both wanted to make sure our wedding was just as special to us as it would be for our family and friends. Guests traveled from all over to be there, so making sure we were having a meaningful and fun-filled day was top priority. Though we did have our non-negotiables specific to us, so much of our decisions were made to ensure we honor the people that made us who we are and led us to each other. Accept the help of your loved ones. I wish we did this more but we planned everything ourselves and didn’t want to burden anyone. However, you learn that your wedding day is anything but a burden to those that care about you. Whether it’s helping collect addresses or researching transportation companies, accept the help.

Details designed:

We wanted to include as many personal touches where we could. Instead of doing engagement photos to use for the Save the Dates, we featured a portrait sketch of us drawn by Marc’s uncle who is a plein air artist. That little piece of paper means so much to us.

We displayed wedding portraits of our parents and grandparents to honor their relationships, which have been a model to ours.

Once we booked the dining and lounge rentals, we mocked up designs of the floorplan for various guest counts in a Word doc by cropping screenshots of the tables, chairs, candle votives, you name it. That was then provided to our month-of coordinator, Courtney Heath of Kelsey Rae Designs. We then worked with her on refining the floorplan to ensure everything would flow nicely at the venue.