Nicole & Russ

This gorgeous New Zealand vineyard wedding takes place in Hawkes Bay which has to be one of the most beautiful places in the world to get married!

Nicole tells the story of how the couple met. “Russ and I met at an 80’s party through a very close mutual friend – he remembered who I was from a dress-up party about a year before that considering my friend and I were completely covered in silver and gold paint dressed up as trophies! We hit it off at the 80’s party and were an item two weeks later.”

Meredith Lord captured the beautiful images of today’s celebration.

Nicole chose a gown by Corina Snow Bridal.

 

Nicole and Russ married at Millar Road. Nicole explains, “Millar Road Luxury Accommodation was exactly what we were looking for. It took 3 months to find and it turned out to be just perfect. There are two smaller two bedroom villas where we got ready and the main house that we had the reception in. They allowed us to self cater and we hired out the entire property so we had time to set up the day before and carry on spending time with our friends and family the day after.”

 

“Our music was ‘Bloodstream’ by Stateless walking up the aisle.”

Of their photographer, Nicole says, “Meredith Lord was amazing! Russ is really camera-shy and hates being in photos and she made him feel so at ease – even from the first meeting we had with her we knew she would be perfect. She did an amazing job and managed to get so many different settings – we didn’t even need to leave the venue so we got everything done so quickly and were able to return to our guests and enjoy the day.”

“The most important part of the wedding was to have everyone feeling relaxed. We did this by having no seating plan so everyone could mingle freely. We wanted to make it feel like a garden party – everyone ended up taking their shoes off, the kids went for swims, we provided lawn games and a constant flow of food and beverages.”

” I did all the decorations and styling myself. I’d collected a lot of jars over the months leading up to the wedding! We self catered (I have 4 chefs in the family!) We actually did pretty much everything ourselves (apart from the cake and the photography).”

MJ’s Cakes created the wedding cake, Nicole explaining, “Russ and I aren’t very traditional people and we really wanted to make a few differences. We decided that we wanted to have a New York baked cheese cake as our wedding cake. Mandy was the only one out of four other bakers that would make us a two tiered cheese cake – it actually consisted of about five cakes in total, layered on top of each other and then cunningly concealed in white chocolate ganache – it was amazing and we had so many great comments from it.”

For their first dance, Nicole recalls, “Our first dance – slightly awkward but it was really lovely. We danced to ‘Blue Veins’ by the Raconteurs and as we were quite shy in the dance department I had arranged for all the bridal party to come on with their partners after the second verse which was great as it got everyone on the dance floor!”

Congratulations on your marriage Nicole and Russ! Thank you for haring your day with us! Thank you also to Meredith Lord for sharing today’s images with us!