Kate and Ryan’s Ojai Wedding

Whenever the girls from Bash, Please put on a wedding, you can always bet it’s going to be full of whimsical details, genius ideas, and crazy fun….always always the fun! Kate & Ryan’s Twin Peaks Ranch wedding is no exception–with an artistic guest book station and even a “kid parade” that preceded the bride down the aisle. We know you’ll adore Kate and Ryan’s story alongside images from Studio Castillero.

Tell us about your wedding and what made it special.

Our wedding was the product of a beautiful collaboration between all of our talented and loving friends and family members. As cliche as it sounds, it ended up truly being the most amazing day of our lives! There were a few times throughout the day when we had a moment to ourselves where we were like, “Oh my gosh, it actually is the most perfect day!”

We picked Ojai because we wanted a small, quaint town where we could gather all of our friends and family from all over the world and not overwhelm our guests with a big city but instead be in the most magical setting in California nestled at the base of the Topa Topa mountains among orange groves. Walking down the aisle with my mom and dad on each arm looking out at the smiling faces of every person who has loved and cared for me and my husband since we were born was incredibly special. We both have so many little cousins and close friends with kids, so we couldn’t settle on just one flower girl and it was important to us that our family and friends all felt like honored guests, so we had a ‘kid parade’ with 14 kiddies under the age of 8 marching down the aisle with musical instruments, flower crowns, and ribbon wands – they definitely stole the show!

Tell us about your gown!

I wore my mom’s vintage lace wedding dress that she bought at a little Victorian dress shop on the Upper East Side in New York City in 1982. It’s a cotton lace beach dress from the turn of the century. When my mom wore it for her wedding, the dress had long sleeves and a high neckline. We worked with a local seamstress to alter the sleeves and neckline and add four inches to the length of the dress. It was a really nerve racking process to watch 100 year old lace be cut knowing once it was cut there was no turning back, but the end result was the most amazing feeling to wear the same dress as my mother 30 years prior.

What were some personal details added to make the day uniquely you?

All of the wood accent pieces used in the decor were made from a large locust tree that fell into my parents house in New Jersey during Super Storm Sandy. My mom asked for a chain saw for Christmas and my dad reluctantly gave it to her – little did he know, this meant that he would be carrying over 400 lbs of wood in his suitcases on the six trips he took to the West Coast over the course of the year leading up to the wedding weekend. The succulent planters were built by my mom and me out of old vintage grape crates from California vineyards. The succulents were all grown from cuttings of plants I have been growing on my patio since I moved to LA seven summers ago. Ryan’s mom is a children’s book author and illustrator who loves painting maps of fairy tale lands for her stories.  She painted a map of our wedding weekend that set the stage for the fairy tale wedding it ended up being. Ryan’s aunt Karen who is an artist designed our Save the Date and invitation suite. One of my graphic designer friends from LA designed all of our paper goods and screen printed an original design on tote bags for the wedding weekend.

What is one of the most memorable moments of the day?

One of our most memorable moments at the wedding was our first dance. Ryan impressed me with his dance moves on our first date dancing at a local LA dive bar on Soul Night, and we both love dancing, but we’re more ‘free form’ kind of dancers. We had attempted to take dance lessons before the wedding, but with the stress of work and wedding planning, we ended up canceling all of our lessons after just two. I was really nervous when we walked out onto the dance floor, but the second the Beatles song, “And I Love Her” started, we just fell into our own world and danced like we were alone in our living room. It was totally not choreographed, but it felt like us and our guests loved it.

Tell us how you met and became engaged.

We met at a holiday party in Los Angeles 5 years ago- one of my friends from high school invited me to Ryan’s apartment for some holiday cheer. We actually grew up in the same town in NJ and went to the same high school, but I was pretty sure Ryan had no idea who I was. We even had the same chemistry tutor, Mr. Bird (perhaps this explains our magnetic chemistry later in life). Ryan barely spoke to me at the party, but he did manage to invite me to brunch the next day and the rest was history.

Ryan completely surprised me by proposing on my 28th birthday. Ryan tied the engagement ring onto our dog Panda’s collar and let her run loose on the beach – a plan that Ryan later admitted “didn’t go as well as I thought” but will definitely make a great story for years to come.