A Surreal, Sun-Drenched Wedding Filled With Art, Fashion, and Unexpected Details

Brenden and Karina's wedding at William Aiken House was basically a festival for the sun. Think golden masks, performers on stilts, coconuts split open with a hatchet, and a "living" seating chart that turned finding your table into part of the show. Karina wore a custom silk gown with a sculptural skirt meant to look like seafoam washing up on the shore. It was a nod to the ocean, which had been there for so many big moments in their relationship. Over the ceremony hung a huge golden sun, tucked into yards of draped fabric. When evening came, the night turned into a proper party: a giant piñata, bejeweled masks, balloon animals, and gelato served in coconut shells. Rather than follow tradition, they wanted to build a world guests could walk into and get lost in. 

Our Love Story

The Day We Met

I was 19 when a boy I had never met came down the hallway of a fraternity house, opened a door, and looked at me for the first time. Three seconds later, before I knew his last name or the sound of his laugh or that I would spend the next nine years building a life with him, I texted my mom, “I just found my husband.” Nine years later, I stood in a hallway in Charleston in a wedding dress, waiting for another door to open. When it did, I walked down the aisle. There he was, 30 now, looking at me the same way he had through that doorway in college, except this time, I already knew everything that first look was about to become.

The Proposal

The ocean has been there for almost every version of us. At 20, it was the Gulf when Brenden asked me to be his girlfriend. After years of long distance, it was the Pacific when he put his grandmother’s ring on my finger as a promise that someday we wouldn’t have to keep saying goodbye. Then, on August 24 on Kiawah Island, I thought we were just walking the beach until I looked up and found him surrounded by flowers, down on one knee beside the Atlantic. Maybe that’s why the ocean has always felt like ours. For so long, one of us was always leaving to go “home.” Standing there with him, I realized how funny that word had been all those years. Home was right in front of me.

The Engagement Ring

Karina thought we had already picked out her ring together, and technically, we had. Then, a few months later, I realized that the one we chose was way too safe for her, so I scrapped it, went with my intuition, and designed a gold bezel oval with an open gallery that exposed the point of the diamond, all without her knowing. Now, it complements the bands we created with Lucy Folk for each other: hers features the sun from our wedding and an orange sapphire, while mine is a signet. Both are engraved with “closer” and “21” in each other’s handwriting.

Our Wedding

The Vision

We turned Charleston into a festival of the sun for one night, with a giant sun coming through the gates on stilts, dancers in golden masks, coconuts split open with a hatchet, a living seating chart, surprise boxes appearing between dinner courses, a piñata and balloon animals on the dance floor, and something unexpected happening every time you thought you had the night figured out.

The majority of our guests were visiting Charleston for the first and last time, and we only had one night to show them what summer in our city feels like to us. So we made it huge and strange and full of sun and called it The Summer We Became Forever.

Our Team of Vendors

On our very first call with our planners, Caitlin and Mikayla from Honey & Thyme, we told them we would rather not have a wedding at all than have one that felt like anybody else’s. On every call, they kept taking our creative ideas, pushing them further, and then making them a reality. They understood that we weren’t just planning a wedding; we were trying to build a world people could step into for one night. That became the way we chose every vendor, too.

We looked through hundreds of options in every category until we found people whose work felt completely aligned with our vision. Once we chose them, we trusted them to be creative directors right alongside us. By the end, it felt less like a group of vendors making our wedding and more like we had found exactly the right people to help us build our festival of the sun from scratch.

The Location

On our very first night in Charleston, we stumbled onto a wedding at the William Aiken House and stood outside the gates, watching strangers dance under the lights. Then, that Saturday became every Saturday, as we watched other people walk down the aisle while we talked about what ours might look like someday. Someday! There were 166 Saturdays between the day we moved to Charleston and the day we got married. On Saturday #166, we came back to the same gate. But this time, we were the ones inside. During our first dance, I looked toward the sidewalk and saw a group of girls standing at the gate, watching us. Their mouths were open, and their phones were out. I waved. We were finally the ones on the other side of the gate.

The Ceremony

My mom told me, “I love you higher than the sky and deeper than the ocean,” so many times growing up that I don’t remember ever not knowing it. Three weeks before the wedding, we changed the ceremony because we decided we had to get married under the sun. So we hung a giant golden one above us, suspended within yards of draping, while the bottom of my dress was custom-designed to look like seafoam where the waves meet the shore. And there I was, with the sky over my head and the ocean at my feet, marrying the man of my dreams. I don’t think I realized until I was standing there that the whole ceremony looked like something my mom had been telling me since I was little.

The Cocktail Hour

The sun had come down from above the altar and started moving through the property. Dancers in giant golden sun masks swayed through the crowd beside performers in woven grass dresses, while our saxophonist and DJ played from the balcony overhead and everyone ate oysters and our favorite Southern bites as they wandered through the house.

Then, the dancers slowly gathered around our seating chart and brought it to life, turning what would normally be a stationary object into the final performance of cocktail hour. Nobody ever announced that it was time for dinner. The night just kept moving!

The Dinner & Reception

Living in a foodie city, we wanted dinner to feel like a true experience of Charleston. So we created three Charleston-inspired courses that combined plated dishes with family-style service, and the sun dancers brought out enhancement boxes for each course. These were filled with sauces, salts, and little additions that let every table keep changing the food, passing things around, and building their own version of each course, so no two people really ate the same dinner. When the final plates were lifted, each guest found a handwritten note from us alongside a Polaroid of a memory we had shared.

Once the real sun went down, we projected another one onto the wall beside the dance floor and kept the festival going. We opened the dance floor with a giant piñata, and everyone crowded in to take a swing until it finally broke open right in the middle of the dance floor. A juggler on stilts moved through the crowd and then started making balloon animals. Guests put on bejeweled masks, the sun-masked performers danced with us while the saxophonist grooved right alongside them, and gelato was served in coconut shells. The Summer We Became Forever!

Our Favorite Moment

We spent almost two years being scared of one thing: rain. We planned every second of the wedding outdoors with no tent and hired a meteorologist to track the storms. But twenty minutes before I walked down the aisle, I watched the clouds turn dark as our planners started moving paper goods inside because the rain was headed straight for us. Then, right when the storm was supposed to hit, it shifted away. It rained at venues just minutes away from us! A single raindrop landed on my mom, and she literally told it, “No.” Then the sun came out and reflected directly off the giant golden sun above us. In the middle of Brenden’s vows, I looked up, saw the real sun glowing on the one we had built over our heads, and started crying.

Our Style

The Bridal Looks

I tried on 104 wedding dresses in New York City and kept waiting for the “big moment” everyone promises you, but every time I looked in the mirror, all I could see was a beautiful dress. Never MY dress. The more everyone rushed me to choose, the more I realized I didn’t want to settle for the dress I disliked the least, so I stopped searching and instead made one with Labay Viktoria. We chose the softest, warm natural silk that felt like butter and shaped the skirt to look like seafoam where the waves break at the shore, so the ocean that had followed Brenden and me through every big moment of our relationship could live in the dress, too.

The Groom Looks

I refused to be a boring groom and decided there was no reason my clothes had to follow the rules, either. For the rehearsal dinner, I wore a Tanner Fletcher shirt with an oversized bow embroidered with our alma mater, 21, and other pieces of our story. On the wedding day, my tuxedo was embroidered with “Forever and Ever,” “21,” and “Closer,” the word we say to each other when we want to be even closer than we already are. Underneath it, I wore another Tanner Fletcher shirt with a giant sun embroidered across the back. Every symbol meant something specific to us, and I wanted what I wore to tell our story just as clearly as the rest of the wedding did.

Our Advice

For the Planning Process

Break the rules. Seriously, who decided a wedding invitation has to be a piece of paper in an envelope? We mailed every guest four oranges covered in produce stickers featuring pieces of our love story and everything they needed to RSVP because that felt more like us than paper. Don’t let the wedding industry hand you a box and convince you that you have to stay inside it.

For On The Day

Weddings have a strange way of pulling the two people at their center in opposite directions. Resist it at all costs. Stay by each other’s side for every moment so the memories you make belong to both of you instead of becoming his or her stories. Your wedding is the first day of your marriage; begin it together.

For Post-Wedding

Debrief with everyone. All your guests attended the same wedding, but no two people experienced it in exactly the same way. Discovering everything that happened beyond your line of sight is half the fun. FaceTime your friends and listen to their favorite moments. Order pizza with your family and ask what they’ll never forget. Relive the day a hundred different ways through the people who mean the most to you.