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Sarah Cooks: Our Wedding Day
Accommodation

Our Wedding Day

11/04/2019 07:56:00 AM

Exactly one year and three days ago, Sandra and I got married.

Two smiling brides
Our Wedding Day

We chose the wedding day to be on our twelfth anniversary of being a couple. I self-deprecatingly joke that it's so I didn't have to remember a new date, but really it was that the date was already special for us and that was the date I've been wanting to make official for years. It had to be that date!

We kept the day very small and as low key as possible. I'd think we succeeded in keeping it relaxed - well as relaxed as a wedding day can be when you are both two type-A planners who hate attention on ourselves and have a tendency towards anxiousness.

We decided to have a small ceremony at the Victorian Marriage Registry with my family and our best men in the afternoon, followed by cake and champagne. In the evening we had a slightly larger dinner (for fourteen people) in a private room at our favourite restaurant, Spice Temple. To keep things easy (and for a touch of luxury), we booked ourselves a room at the Park Hyatt for the night before and the night of the wedding. It's walking distance from the Victorian Marriage Registry, the foyer and rooms are lovely and luxurious, and the rooms are significantly larger than average hotel rooms in the CBD, so it was spacious enough to have ten people in there for cake and champagne after the ceremony.

We're both the type of people that have a small group of really good friends, rather than a large circle of acquaintances, so this was exactly the type of celebration we wanted. (And honestly, organising this wedding was stressful enough as it was; I have no idea how people cope with larger weddings with hundreds of invitees, marquees, seat plans, caterers, function centres, the whole works!)

Here are some photos.

Handwritten Wedding Invitations
Wedding Invitations! Because we had such a small guest list, we hand wrote the invitations and decorated them with photos of us and the guests. (The cards are Kikki-K "Always and Forever" photo cards)

Bags of wedding favours
Wedding Favours! We made a little gift bag for each guest.

Granola, honey, champagne
Wedding Favours! The gift bags were to help our guests continue the celebrations the next day. Homemade wedding granola (recipe here), honey, and a mini Moët! (Inspired by the Vue de Monde gift bags)

Park Hyatt Melbourne King Club Room
Park Hyatt "King with Club Access" Room. Super spacious (60 sq metre) with big bathroom, huge bathtub, walk in closet and large sitting area. Perfect for all the prep we needed and the post-wedding champagne and cake!

Room service Club Sandwich, Fries, Steak
We spent the night before the wedding chilling at the hotel, eating room service and watching (of all things) Bride and Prejudice

Monogrammed "Bride" Robe
Yes, I bought us matching "Bride" robes and monogrammed PJs to wear while getting ready, and I'm not sorry. They're from Le Rose.

Bride in make-up chair
We went to get our hair done in the morning, then came back to the hotel to get our make-up done by make-up artist extraordinaire Stephanie D'Aquino. She is THE BEST! My bro was taking photos, and my best man Jimbo delivered us iced coffees and sandwiches to the make-up chair.

Wedding bouquet
Wedding Bouquet! I'd asked around, and the average price for wedding bouquets was $200 each. NO THANKS! I got my best man to buy two flower jars from The Road Stall and bring them to our room while we were getting ready. Only $30 and so beautiful! They've since gone up to $40, but still way better value than a wedding bouquet.

White lace wedding dresses
On our way to the ceremony. Literally the only time I've ever walked faster than Sandra when there wasn't some kind of free canapé involved.

Friends and Family at the wedding
Photos from the ceremony, at the Victorian Marriage Registry. Yessss making it official!
You'll also see our joint best man An holding both bouquets. I don't believe in the "tossing the bouquet" tradition, but he was the only single one there so we just directly handed him the bouquets after the ceremony, hehe.

Walking brides
Wedding day walk #2, on our way back to the hotel

Two brides with bouquets
The Happy Couple!
Instagrammable wall is in the driveway of Park Hyatt
Hair: Eunji at Tony and Guy Georges
Makeup: Stephanie D'Aquino
Sarah's Dress: Oxford Lane Dress from Review (I bought it 2 days before, and it was only $200, yay!)
Sandra's Dress: Lillian West
Sarah's Shoes: Wittner; Sandra's Shoes: Nine West
Flowers: $30 flower jars from The Road Stall

Bride with Champagne
Yes! We did it!

Glasses of champagne
Champagne! Time to bring out the good stuff

Bride instagramming wedding cake
Always. Be. Influencing.

Wedding cake and champagne
Wedding Cake and Champagne. The cake was Beatrix's Red Velvet Cake, we pre-ordered it and my best man went to pick it up while we were getting ready. I'd bought the pointy-boobed bride cake topper from Cake Deco Supplies a few weeks before. Champagne from the brides' own collection.

Private dining room, Spice Temple
The Nu Wa Room at Spice Temple. We loved the dinner! The booking process was so easy - we liaised with the functions team over email, making a custom banquet menu, pre-ordering wine and advising them of dietary requirements. They printed place cards for us, and we were assigned a waitress who took great care of us, paced out the meals to fit in our toasts, and kept our drinks floooooowing.

Spice Temple Banquet Menu
Wedding Banquet Menu! We basically picked all our favourites from our many previous visits to Spice Temple, following the format of their existing banquet menus. This one was $89 per head (and they also swapped in some different dishes for our different dietary requirements - vegetarian, coeliac, pescetarian, no beef, no seafood).

Spice Temple Banquet
Dinner! So delicious! Yes, I'm aware lots of these are out of focus. They were the best ones I took - it was dark and I was tipsy and overwhelmed with fun times and love from my wife (WIFE!), family, and friends.

Two cocktails
The Spice Temple team even surprised us with a round of complimentary cocktails! One key requirement we had for the wedding was ABSOLUTELY NO SPEECHES, as Sandra and I are incredibly uncomfortable with big displays of emotion. However, our chief best man An crafted a fun "story" (technically not a speech) about our friendship which was lovely. This was followed by very nice non-emotional toasts from my father and my best man, and a succinct but heartfelt "thank-you all" speech from me.
Family and friends at the wedding dinner
Peeps at the wedding dinner! So much fun! So much love!
Please also note the fur stole and ballerina wrap that Sandra and I are wearing, both from Review. We sent my best man out to get them during the day when we realised we didn't have coats to match our dresses! He even got the staff member to allocate the purchase to my customer account so I could get points. "Wow, you're well trained", they said. (Yeah, we worked him very hard that day, sorry Jimbo).

Sleeping Labrador with wombat
Mr Walker, the Park Hyatt's canine ambassador, perfectly summing up how we felt the next day

And that was our wedding! We were totally exhausted by the end of the day but also so happy! We managed to do it exactly how we wanted, and were floored by the amount of effort and love from our friends and family. My dad couldn't sleep the night before; my mum was awake and dressed before anyone else in the house was; my bro flew in from Japan with two tuxes; my best man Jimbo and his fiancée Jenni flew in from Malaysia hand-carrying a heavy and fragile gift (and he spent the whole morning zooming around town doing errands for us); Sandra's best man Suryadi came even though he had a one-month old at home (and of course the thanks go to him and his lovely wife Jean for enabling him to come out on the day); our joint best man An had literally flown in from Europe the morning of the wedding and still got everywhere on time because he is an organisation machine. People dressed up, brought thoughtful gifts, joined in the celebrations and were generally awesome! It was the best day ever! Yaaaaay!

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3 comments

  1. Awww! What a great post of what looks like such a wonderful day. Kudos to you to photographing things on your wedding day. There's no way I could have coped with that!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great post. Looks like it was a lovely, special day.

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  3. What a perfect wedding, exactly how you wanted it! Everyone and everything looked so lovely. Happy anniversary!

    ReplyDelete

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