Today’s featured Little Black Book member is Tracey Kumer-Moore of Your Las Vegas Wedding Concierge. Planning destination weddings in Las Vegas is Tracey’s specialty! She’ll help you with everything from start to finish ~ leaving you to bask in the fun and celebration. Vegas weddings can run the gamut from stylish and sophisticated to theme-based or whimsical and everything in between. But, there is one thing that they all have in common. Your guests are sure to have a blast!
Granted, not all Vegas weddings are destination weddings, but since the vast majority of them are, it’s critical that you find an expert like Tracey who specializes in making your wedding weekend stress-free … one that you and your guests will never forget!
And now, from Tracey and Elizabeth (today’s beautiful bride)…
images courtesy of altF photography
Our wedding ended up being a destination wedding… sort of! Las Vegas is our “home town” at present, but almost all of our family and friends would be journeying to our wedding from all over the US and Europe. We realized we were getting married in the quickie drive-through wedding capital of the world, but we absolutely wanted a sophisticated, modern wedding that was full of unique details and reflected our personalities. We also wanted our out of town guests to know how honored we were that they made the trip, and so it was very important to us to throw a super fun and unforgettable wedding that would be the highlight of their Las Vegas experience. With those ideas in mind, we set about assembling our “Dream Team” of wedding professionals.
WEDDING VENUE
The Four Seasons Hotel was the best of all possible worlds for us—it’s an intimate non-gaming, non-smoking property at the southern end of The Strip (which appealed to us), but it’s within walking distance of several big resort casinos (which we knew would appeal to our guests). The Fountain Terrace itself is like an oasis of calm and beauty in the midst of vibrant non-stop Las Vegas. It features a picturesque waterfall, lush landscaping and seasonal flowers, and dramatic up-lit statues. What Andy and I loved about it was that being on the Terrace, you could almost forget you were in the middle of noisy non-stop, Las Vegas, until you looked up and saw the golden tower of neighboring Mandalay Bay Resort stretching to the sky. We felt like the juxtaposition perfectly captured exactly what we wanted for our un-Vegas Vegas wedding!
FLORAL DESIGN
We told Randi Garrett of Naakiti Floral Design that we didn’t want a single rose anywhere in any of our wedding flowers, and that we liked materials like reeds, moss, rocks, grasses, Lucite and stainless steel. She didn’t bat an eyelash! She created our chuppah as a modern, geometric structure with black wrought iron columns and sheer white silk panels with white pillar candles glowing from behind. The result was a soft yet modern silhouette. The rest of the ceremony design included a custom white runner lined in our lime color flanked by alternating arrangements of high horsetails with moss beds and low black lacquer trays of floating green and white orchids. Flowers for the cocktail hour and reception followed in this vein, with lots of bamboo, wheat grass, orchids, and votive candles. One of the most important design elements of our wedding ended up being our reception linen choice: a crinkled white taffeta with a thick black floral design winding through. We carried this theme everywhere!
OUR INVITATIONS
First, we had custom invitations designed by Tifany, the genius of Gourmet Invitations. Tifany created all the paper products for our wedding using variations on this black and white floral graphic accented with lime green: a seating chart with our dinner menu, table numbers, postage stamps, bar menus, and thank you cards. The reception linen inspired graphic even made its way on to our cake and on to the pages our wedding album!
invitation images courtesy of Gourmet Invitations
OUR CAKE
Our cake was truly a work of art. It was a square, three tiered confection of alternating layers of vanilla sponge cake and mango mousse and chocolate sponge cake with milk chocolate hazelnut praline filling. It was white featuring our signature floral graphic done in black fondant, and was topped with a custom topper of our “miniature family”: a four-inch tall recreation of me, my husband, and our two pugs Grover and Petunia! Not only was our wedding attire correctly depicted on the figurines, but the pugs’ blue dog tags were too. {Cake topper from Nicole W Clark)
OUR CELEBRATION
Throughout the evening, Andy and I tried to incorporate as many details as possible that were uniquely “us”. Our ketubah {from Micah Parker Artworks) was a nod to Roy Lichtenstein (a fun comic book rendition of a groom’s foot stomping on a glass, and a comic book style voice bubble crying “Mazeltov!” in the background). We used “green” as more than just one of our colors, and purchased our recycled platinum and diamond wedding bands from eco-friendly jeweler Brilliant Earth.
Music was another top priority for us. We didn’t want a DJ spinning the same ubiquitous songs that we’ve all heard a million times. We loved the idea of live music, but also recognized its limitations when playing more contemporary songs our younger guests would appreciate. Our compromise? We got a band AND a DJ! The Steve Beyer Band provided all musical entertainment for the evening. It was a perfect blend and a real chance to showcase our musical personalities. We relied solely on the DJ for our ceremony music. As our guests were arriving, they were serenaded by classical string arrangements of all our favorite contemporary pop songs. It was great to hear guests were asking each other “Is this Nirvana?” or “I’m pretty sure this is a U2 song”. For the processional, it was all covers of favorite pop tunes—my husband entered with his parents to the Eagles of Death Metal’s version of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love”, and I walked down the aisle to a remix of Pete Townshend’s “Let My Love Open the Door”. Our guests spent the cocktail hour following the ceremony on the winding path adjacent to the Fountain Terrace, where they listened to the sounds of the band’s jazz guitarist.
In keeping with our wedding colors, I’d made a slight costume change and added a thick black satin sash and black patent Manolo Blahniks to my romantic lace Monique L’Huillier strapless gown from Couture Bride Salon. Andy and I made our grand entrance to the band playing “Walking on Sunshine”, and in lieu of our first dance (which we had midway through the reception), we transitioned directly into a rousing Horah. Getting lifted up on those chairs was fun but scary!
We had two signature cocktails: the Meddling Moms Martini (in honor of our mothers, who set us up), and the Parisian Picnic (in honor of Paris, the site of our engagement). When cocktail hour was finished, the guests made their way back into the Fountain Terrace, which had been transformed into all its reception glory.
Our final surprise of the evening happened around 11 PM, when servers began passing trays of frozen Eskimo Pies and spiked Root Beer floats, and the fresh, hot doughnut station opened! As if that wasn’t enough food, we also had a savory snack of French Fries and Tater Tots in paper cones for those with a salty tooth.
We truly had the wedding of our dreams. We kept it very small, so each and every guest was a beloved friend or family member. We infused our modern-looking wedding with sentimental touches like using the Kiddush cup and tallis from Andy’s Bar Mitzvah during our ceremony.
OUR WEDDING PLANNER
When Tracey showed us a three inch binder containing all the planning notes, vendor contracts and important documents from a wedding she had just coordinated, we knew she was the one for us! Her expertise and professional connections got us off to a great start and kept us on track up until the band played the last song at our reception.
In a city that can be lovingly synonymous with all thing Elvis and kitsch, we had an elegant, sophisticated wedding that we felt was really “out of the box” in all the best possible ways. Our wedding was everything we had hoped and imagined it would be. And best of all? It was all just icing on the wedding cake, since we were finally married to each other!
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