Vogue’s Beauty Editor Tapped A Beloved British Bridal Designer For Her Country Wedding
For a long time, Ben – my now husband – evaded me. Or, rather, we evaded each other. Neighbours at university, and with lots of mutual friends, we moved in the same North London circles for years, quietly missing each other at every turn. That is, until a dating app served me Ben’s profile. The rest, as they say, is history.
In March of 2024, freshly planted in our new house, Ben invited me down to the garden for “a walk”. “No,” I shouted down the stairs. Not only is our garden the size of three postage stamps, but I was going to be late for lunch with my friend Phoebe. He pleaded and I acquiesced – the vibe was weird, but the sun was out.
One half-turn later, he dropped to one knee and asked me to marry him. It felt like all of our separate lifetimes converging at once, every invisible string stitching together at last. He had designed the ring – an octagonal, Art-Deco sapphire surrounded by diamonds – with Robert Glenn, and it glinted in the early spring sunshine.
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Our venue search was wonderfully short. One weekend, while visiting Ben’s family in Wiltshire, we took a trip to Fonthill Estate – a storied, sprawling property that stretched down into the woods and up into farmland, and encompassed a lake as well as myriad useable barns. For a Norfolk girl like me, it was perfect. We immediately snapped up the only date they had – 20 September 2025 – and began to think in earnest about what the hell we were going to do.
Our guiding word was organic. We didn’t want anything stuffy, rigid or boring. We wanted to involve our family and our friends in the ceremony, we wanted them to eat delicious food cooked on an open fire, and we wanted to dance well into the early hours. We had two distinct visions for the day: a wild, natural Jewish ceremony held outside, then a jazz-club themed afterparty (with no curfew) complete with yurts for guests to eventually collapse in. Our wedding planner, Rosie Barrett, made it all possible.
Ben turned out to be the engine behind the process, interviewing musicians and determining which tablecloth best represented his internal world. I, meanwhile, took on the mantle of liaising with our florist – the incomparable Lucie Newbegin of Bud Flora – and angsting over guests remembering which shuttle bus they booked.
