Wedding | David & Ian

Tell us a little about yourselves!

We met in 2015, as a freshman and sophomore at UC Berkeley. We studied the same program, and quickly spent all our time together. We bonded over our connection to the great Californian outdoors, our fascination with world culture and queer history, and our love of throwing parties and enjoying nightlife. 

Our first vacation, during Thanksgiving break freshman year, was down to Palm Springs. The desert floor was balmy and warm, but just a short ride up the aerial tramway to the top of San Jacinto Peak was the first snow of the season. Getting snow peppering our hair when we were just suntanning by the pool an hour earlier was one of the most magical holiday experiences I’d had. Eight years later, on a Thanksgiving trip with friends, Ian took us back up that peak, and proposed during the (snow-free) sunset.

We live in San Francisco and love the vibrant, creative community here. There’s pockets for all kinds of interests, but it’s small enough to still feel tight-knit. David is crafty and artistic, and ended up investing a lot of creative energy into this wedding, including sewing together some outfits, designing all the invites, menus, and signage, and custom printing a series of bandanas as guest gifts. Ian’s passions for bringing people together, throwing raucous but well-organized parties, were essential to keeping our wedding planning on track. Together, we threw the best long-weekend camping extravaganza we could!

Why did you decide to get married where you did?

Without a second thought, it was certain we’d have our wedding in California. It’s the only place we’ve ever considered our home. David’s first vision was the great big rocks in the ocean. There are plenty of calm, warm, sandy beaches around the world, but northern California, the beginning of the Pacific Northwest, is where you find the forested cliff sides abutting the sea, where the roiling waves crashing against large sea-stacks give the ocean gravity and dimension. It was a unique view we wanted to honor, and make sure our out-of-town relatives got to appreciate.

We went up and down the California coast, touring venues in the Monterey/Carmel area, the Marin area, and finally the Mendocino area. When we visited Cuffey’s Cove Ranch, in rural Elk outside Mendocino, we stood on the top of the venue’s hill and saw nothing but nature, and heard nothing but the crashing of the sea below. A few deer glanced at us from behind the trees, and huge turkey vultures drifted slowly in the sky. It was perfect.

As we continued planning, it became clearer and clearer our decision was the right one for us. Our planner, Zoe Braga, let us in on the network of indie vendors in the area, who were forgiving and flexible to our numerous requests, and never shut down an oddball idea. The venue, a 1000-acre cattle ranch with a few empty barns, came with very little - it was a complete tabula rasa where we came up with the menu and programming, constructed a camping village under the stars, and transformed event to event all throughout the four days of celebrations.

How many guests did you have?

We hit our target of just under 150 of our friends and family. A lucky 50 of them stayed on-site all weekend in the glamping tents.

What was your budget?

While we did track it closely, we were very fortunate to execute our vision without a significant amount of concern for budget, due to reasonable prices from vendors in Mendocino, the guidance of our planner, a DIY spirit, easy-going guests, and support from our family.

Tell us about your outfits.

We had a lot of fun planning our outfits. But we’d like to showcase a couple details in particular:

Something old: On the morning of the ceremony, we came out to a picnic in shirts that David had sewed out of pieces of vintage handkerchiefs. Each kerchief was unique, decorated with lace borders and embroidered florals.

Something borrowed: For the ceremony, Ian wore a blue satin suit. They had been obsessed with the Dior Men’s runways around 2020, where Kim Jones incorporated a billowing sash scarf wrapped around the suit. Try as we might, we couldn’t source that design anywhere, but a crafty friend helped us make it happen. Kevin, our brilliant costume-designer, spent several days with us sewing hidden buttons and bolts of pearlescent silk satin to reverse engineer this sash design. Even better, he made Ian three different lengths of sashes to fit the different moods of the evening: an extra long one that floated like a train during the ceremony, a medium length one appropriate for pictures, and a short one so their hands could be free to dance at the reception. We are so grateful to Kevin, who let us borrow his time and expertise to help make Ian’s dream suit come true.

Something new: For David’s suit, we went shopping in Paris! We were drawn back to Dior. Most of their tailoring is quite classic, but we fell in love with a heavy tweed boucle item off the runway. Bits of shiny reflective material were woven throughout the light tan textile, making it shimmer in the light. We loved the suits together - not matching, but a set, united by unconventional textures, and references to nature. Ian’s blue silk was the sea, and David’s tan tweed was the dry meadow grasses.

Something blue: We’d like to spotlight our rings! A wonderful San Francisco based jeweler, Gem Breakfast, led us through the custom design process for our set. We love color and unconventional stones, and David had learned about parti sapphires - precious stones with bands of different colors swirling through the rock. These kinds of stones are usually discarded in the rough as imperfections. However, Gem Breakfast specializes in sourcing these one-of-a-kind stones where the unusual coloration enhances the visual interest and beauty of the gem. The sapphire we found and decided to feature in David’s ring has bands of blue and white, making it look like a portrait of the ocean itself. To go with, and to echo our personal refrain of “to the moon and back”, Ian got a matching white gold band engraved with stars, and peppered with a gradient of sapphires, aquamarines, and diamonds.

What was the most important aspect for you, in terms of planning your wedding?

Ian read The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, which has given us a great framework for thinking about what makes a great party. According to the book, it’s not enough for a party to simply celebrate the event itself, be it a birthday or wedding. Truly memorable parties have a thesis, a message, that’s woven throughout the gathering and ties together all the different elements.

For the wedding, our thesis focused on the idea that California is a place where legends grow larger than life. In early Spanish expeditions to California, their early navigation and cartography reported California to be a long island separate from the rest of the American continent, covered in gold. Even when subsequent expeditions clarified that, actually, Baja California did connect back to the continent further north, maps and atlases continued to be sold in Europe depicting a detached, Eden-like island of California for hundreds of years. The myth of the American west coast loomed larger in people’s minds than any reality.

In our lifetimes, the myth of California has only grown. Whether boom or bust, paradise or hellscape, it’s hard to meet someone without an opinion on where we live. The living legends have made this place a mecca for technology, queer life, tree huggers, entertainers, and whoever else believes in something a bit magic.

This thesis helped guide many decisions throughout the process. We opted for local wines, and local ingredients and references for our catering and cakes. We structured the activities and camping to let our guests enjoy different aspects of the Californian wilderness in small groups.

Radostina Boseva’s focus on film photography is breathtaking and frames the mythic vibe of our memories perfectly. Then, in the spirit of mythology, we consciously decided not to hire videography for the wedding. We wanted to make sure there was enough leeway for our guests’ imaginations to fudge the details when they retell their experiences, so that the wedding itself grows into a legend larger than life as time goes on.

Were there any elements that were important for you to incorporate?

We structured the weekend to give opportunities for people to take in and appreciate the magic we see in California. Our first day of guest activities was Summer Camp themed, including picnic areas set up on Cuffey’s Cove Ranch to make keychains and Chinese traditional good-luck knots, bandanas adorning every neck with a design illustrated by David, and small-group offsite activities designed to help take in the view: a guided hike up the ridge, a kayaking crew through coastal sea-caves, and horseback riding on the beach along huge magnificent sea rocks. It gave us free time to connect with our guests without time pressure.

For David, it was important to celebrate his Chinese heritage. His extended family from China wasn’t able to make the event. However, he was able to see important family in the months beforehand to get their blessings and well wishes. He expressed their presence and these blessings through the visual design of the event. Our logo is a pair of classical Chinese seals that were hand-carved by David, one combining our initials D + I, and the other representing a pair of “happiness” characters, a common symbol for Chinese weddings. The cocktail hour the night before the ceremony coincided with the Qixi festival, a Chinese Valentine’s Day, and David illustrated a centerpiece arc of magpies as well as the happy couple as the Weaver and the Cowherd, the two main characters of the Qixi legend, and Ian studied Chinese to read a poem, “Que Qiao Xian,” for the whole crowd, which deeply resonated with our guests who understood the language.

Additionally, David’s mother’s family was able to connect with a traditional landscape artist in China and commission an ink painting scroll depicting the exact view of the rocks from the Cuffey’s Cove Ranch in a Tang dynasty style. We featured this painting in our invitation suite and also hung a large banner of it above our head table during the reception dinner.

We also took care to make sure that our wedding was unabashedly queer, in a way that would feel connected to the past and future. To us, queerness is a bright nexus of joy in our lives that connects us deeply to our closest friends. To celebrate those whose shoulders we stand on, Ian’s great-aunt Molly delivered a very special address during the ceremony. She founded the movement that established Women’s History Month in the US. But even as a fierce feminist activist, she had to hide her identity as a lesbian for much of her career, until the gay liberation movement was able to progress forward in more recent decades. To celebrate our connection to San Francisco’s queer, creative community, we invited two legendary San Francisco-based drag queens from our favorite bar, Lisa Frankenstein and Nicki Jizz, to perform a surprise set during our reception.

Any tips for couples getting married?

These days, it’s common for couples to focus on the things they don’t want their wedding to be: perhaps they don’t want it to be religious, or patriarchal, or stuffily formal. But this sometimes results in an event which has a void in its emotional core. Some modern weddings can come off with little personal meaning beyond “I love my partner.”

We would encourage people to find something specific they are celebrating with their wedding and center that. Align with your partner on what you care about most in the world and how you want to use your wedding to communicate that to your guests. It was freeing for us that, as a gay couple, we were already exempt from a lot of traditions, and our family didn’t have very many burdensome expectations. We were able to piece together a ceremony and surrounding event which was made up of traditions old and new. And then importantly, we treated our new activities as seriously as heirloom traditions, and our guests followed suit.

Are there any vendors that you would like to tell us a little more about?

Perhaps the most daunting task when we chose our venue was providing fitting accommodations in rural Mendocino for 150 guests. Airbnb and local hotels covered a good number of guests, but our most special accommodations were provided by Wayward Glamping, a local Mendocino based vendor who set up 25 tents onsite for 50 of our guests. These delightful tents came equipped with a queen sized bed and everything else guests needed, from lighting to charging stations.

Our photographer, Radostina Boseva, was a beacon of light on the chaotic day of the ceremony. We connected so deeply with her since she is a fellow art nerd with an encyclopedic well of knowledge about the craft of film photography. She was positive, calm, and collected throughout the whole day, deftly reorganizing the schedule when needed: for example, when heavy fog rolled in unexpectedly before sunset.

Our biggest surprise gift to our guests was our drag queen performers during the reception. Oasis is a cabaret bar in San Francisco, which has been our favorite venue for drag and queer entertainment ever since we moved to the city after college. Just about a month before the wedding, they announced their plan to close at the end of 2025. We were heartbroken to hear the news, but figured our best way to support the project was to support the queens directly.  Lisa Frankenstein and Nicki Jizz, our queens, host two of Oasis’s raucous drag parties. It was absolutely magical to see all of our guests, from our family visiting from out of state to our friends who are Oasis regulars, light up when the queens came out to perform as Gaga and Beyonce.

Cali Costa Catering pulled together an amazing celebration of California, gracing our tables with only local vegetables and meats. They went out of their way to make our dreams reality, including purchasing a large BBQ grill to bring on-site as a centerpiece of the cocktail hour, as well as securing a connection with Hog Island Oysters for the most luxurious hors d’oeuvres.

Last but certainly not least, we want to thank Zoe Braga, our wedding planner. She is one of most capable, organized, and well networked people we have ever met, while also always maintaining a very chill energy through the planning process. This balance makes her extremely well suited for her job, allowing us to relax knowing that everything would be handled perfectly. We worked with Zoe Braga from the beginning, before we had chosen a venue, all the way through to saying goodbye after the brunch the day after the wedding. We are eternally grateful to her for helping us pull off the wedding of our wildest dreams!

Photographer: Radostina Boseva @radostina.photography | Planning: Zoë Braga Events @zoebragaevents | Flora: Eva Lina Floral @evalina.floral | Ceremony & Reception Location: Cuffey’s

Cove Ranch @cuffeyscoveranch | Celebrant: Friend of the Couple | Hire: Matt Rowland Events

@mattrowlandevents | MUA: Maddalena MUA @maddalenamakeup_ | Catering: Cali Costa Catering

@calicostacatering | Beverages: Mendocino Outland @mendocino.outland.bartending | Cake: Franny’s Cup and Saucer @frannyscupandsaucer | Stationery:  Made by the groom | DJ: Sami Fink  @thespellbounddj | Drag Queens: Nicki Jizz  @nicki_jizz and Lisa Frankenstein @itslisafrankenstein | Vinyl DJ: Colby Heiman | Glamping: Wayward Glamping @glamp_girl | Mobile Sauna: Mendosauna @mendo.sauna | Wedding Day Yoga: La Sirena Yoga @lasirenayoga | Suits: (David) Dior @dior & (Ian) Paul Smith @paulsmith with customisations | Engagement Rings: Mejuri @mejuri | Wedding Rings: Gem Breakfast @gembreakfast | Shoes: (David) Camper  @camper & (Ian) Maison Margiela @maisonmargiela