A Mediterranean wedding, in a Mediterranean building, by the sea

Some venues you design against. La Valencia you design with. The pink hotel on Prospect Street has stood over La Jolla Cove since 1926, and its Spanish-Mediterranean architecture, the tower, the tiled stairs, the ocean a block away, gives a wedding its point of view before a single flower is placed. Roberta and Sid wanted exactly that: a Mediterranean wedding, in a Mediterranean building, by the sea. We planned it, designed it, built the florals, and supplied the rentals as one team.

Roberta and Sid

Their wedding had a name before it had a date: “Love Is in the Air.” What they wanted was warmth, color, and a day that felt like a long dinner somewhere on the Mediterranean rather than a program to get through.

The ceremony in El Jardín

The ceremony was held in The Garden, El Jardín, the hotel’s garden that seats up to about 150 and sits inside the pink walls with the sky above and the sea a block away. The altar is already there: a hand-painted tile mural of a Spanish woman with a fan, set into a pink wall and framed by clipped hedges, with the Pacific and a line of palms behind the garden and the hotel’s pool terrace below. We did not compete with it. Two stone pedestals carried planted pots in blue-and-yellow Spanish ceramic, lanterns and more potted greenery ran along the low pink walls on either side, the aisle was drawn in cream rose petals in loose, winding lines across the lawn, and white garden chairs did the rest. It read as part of the garden rather than something set down in it. The pedestals, pots, lanterns, and chairs came from Bella Mia’s rental collection.

The Terraza, the Veranda Ballroom, and the Salon

The reception took all three connected spaces, which together hold up to about 175. That is the number that makes La Valencia what it is: every table is close enough to the next that a toast lands in the whole room.

Cocktail hour was on the Terraza, the terracotta terrace with the pink hotel rising on one side and the ocean on the other. Champagne was passed in the garden while guests came up. The cocktail tables wore white linen with a run of Italian ruscus, a single lemon, tall stemmed votives, and a mercury-glass candle: the whole Mediterranean idea in four objects. The hotel’s cheese board, carved with its own name and dressed in edible flowers, did the rest.

The Veranda Ballroom has a black-and-white checkered floor, crystal chandeliers, and a wall of blue watercolor florals, and that wall is where the palette came from. Greenery, blues, and cream were chosen to sit inside the room’s own colors, so nothing we placed looked placed. The cake table was a dark wood farm table against that wall, with weathered white lanterns at each end, gold woven chargers, and votives between them.

Dinner was in the Salon, under a coffered ceiling and crystal chandeliers, on a herringbone floor: long tables in a U, crossback chairs, white damask linens, gold woven chargers, and the blue, finally, in the glassware, hobnail goblets in deep teal at every place, every piece of it from Bella Mia’s own rental collection. Down the center of every table ran a garland of olive and eucalyptus with lemons and cream roses tucked in, mercury votives between them. Guests moved from El Jardín to the Terraza to the Salon without the design changing its mind.

The cake

Three tiers from The Fabulous Cake Girls, each with its own texture: rope at the base, a diamond quilt in the middle, pleats at the top, all in cream, with a cascade of cream roses and ruscus down one side. It sat on a gold crystal stand at the center of the farm table, between the lanterns, with the blue watercolor wall behind it. It was the most photographed object in the room for a reason: it was the palette in one piece.

The palette

Greenery, blues, and cream. Against a pink stucco building and a blue ocean, the temptation is to add more color; the discipline is to add less. Roberta’s bouquet was peach-cream garden roses and white ranunculus with sprays of white lace flower, eucalyptus, and ruscus, loose and unstructured, and the same cream and green ran from the petal aisle to the tables. Blues came from the room itself and from the sea a block away. Greenery did the work of making the arrangements look like they had grown there. The rule at La Valencia is simple: the building is pink, the sea is blue, and the florals either join that conversation or interrupt it. We joined it.

Music, and the moment that mattered

Two sources of music, on purpose. Paper Moon Music played classical guitar for the ceremony and cocktail hour, and DJ Sammy Denatto of Dancing DJ Productions took the reception, so the day moved from strings by the sea to a dance floor without the room ever going quiet. The guitarists’ corner was set the way the altar was: two chairs, two guitars, and around them the same blue-and-yellow Spanish pots, ferns, and lanterns from the ceremony, carried inside so the music looked like it belonged to the garden. That is the small decision guests do not notice and photographers always do.