A fun and documentary styled wedding day for Brenna & Tarek – we love how the candid moments here really shone through and the film aesthetic really lent itself to a timeless capture of the day!
How did you two meet? What were your first impressions of one another?
On a cold DC February morning in 2020, Tarek arrived at a brunch for an acquaintance’s birthday at a restaurant and sat down towards the end of the table next to an empty seat. Moments later, a woman sat next to him. “Hi, I’m Brenna” she said, introducing herself. With little to talk about initially, the conversation was cordial—about restaurants, food, and cooking, things they discovered to be passions they both shared. Later when the party moved to another location, and with it their conversation, topics became less anodyne. “Palestine”, she said again when Tarek asked her to clarify that he’d heard her correctly, “I did my grad school research in Palestine.” They chatted about their shared love of Musakhan (مسخن), the national dish of Palestine, and the difficulty of cracking the perfect hummus.After they parted ways that day, Tarek felt something unusual—something had stirred. “I had the strangest premonition”, he told his friend, Brendan, on a call as he walked home, “that I just met the person I’m going to marry.”To say the rest is history would be…entirely incorrect.Through the pandemic Brenna and Tarek became closer friends, often cooking together, playing with new pets, and planning future trips—as they both love to travel. So it was entirely appropriate that while on a Summer trip together to New York City the spark grew a bit brighter and they couldn’t ignore it. It started when they barely made their train—they first got on one train only to realize it was out of service!—and enjoyed a bottle of Puglian red that Tarek had procured. “I wanted to kiss you right then and there,” he told her later.“If this works out like I think it will”, Tarek said on an evening walk through Central Park as they discussed the future and the dangers of dating a friend, “I’m in it to marry you.” “I know,” she said, “me, too.”On the train back to DC (they love trains!) they discussed how surprised people were going to be, especially their families. But, this new side to their relationship, it turned out, was news to exactly no one. Nor was Tarek’s proposal to Brenna at the family vacation house in Costa Rica in the Spring of 2023.Despite Tarek’s overwhelmingly brilliant skills as a confident orator, his proposal—which featured two rings because he wasn’t sure how the one he designed would turn out—was adorably rife with run-on sentences and deeply mixed metaphors involving travel and a heavy reliance on macaw imagery. Naturally, she said “yes”.
Any special ways you incorporated your family or family history into your wedding day?
All aspects of our wedding were intentional and were largely custom designed! We worked with the venue to craft a drink and dinner menu that featured items such as Georgian Rkatsiteli amber wine—reflecting our passion for natural and skin-contact wine—while the dinner menu started with a kibbeh and baba ghanouj mezze, celebrating the culinary heritage of the groom’s Syrian ancestry. Complementing the stationery suite, dinner menus (which were individualized for each guest, and reflected each guest’s dinner preferences and dietary requirements) were blind-embossed with the same cipher of intertwined family name initials, which was also embroidered in navy blue and silver on handmade custom fabricated extra large 22” hemstitched linen napkins. During the the ceremony processional our harpist played Enta Oumri, a piece well known across the Arab world, that was specially arranged for harp for the occasion, and at the bride’s request we walked to the theme from the BBC’s 1995 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice during the recessional. During dinner, a world-renowned oud player that the groom had met as part of a charity he is involved with, performed Syrian classical pieces.
Perhaps only excepting the venue itself—the Cosmos Club, Washington, DC – and its breathtaking Warne ballroom—which is the architectural embodiment of our shared aesthetic sensibilities, every aspect of our wedding décor was intentional and intentionally designed. There’s DIY and there’s DIY—it would be difficult to describe any part of our wedding as “DIY”, but there were many things that we designed or made ourselves: the stationery suite, which the groom entirely designed, was custom fabricated (he included specifications for everything—from the weight, stock, and composition of the paper, to the envelope liner, to even the width of the gum on the envelope flap); we also made place card stands that we cut and professionally gilt from historic wood molding reclaimed from the gilded age mansion of a nineteenth century senator and vice-president; we also laid out and printed the table cards—instead of numbering tables, we named tables after historically and personally significant places in Syria and Ireland, such as Damascus, Dublin, Aleppo, Tipperary, Palmyra, and Belfast.
What part of your wedding day was/is most important to you?
While of course the ceremony, being carefully crafted by the couple, was definitely the highlight of the day, the party featured a few special moments that were much anticipated and enjoyed! The bride was especially excited for the champagne tower – actually pouring it and then using the glasses to kick off the final toast of the evening. The first dance was also a hard-earned accomplishment. Choreographed by the bride, who has a dance background, and patiently taught to the groom, the dance started as a classic waltz and then transitioned into an Irish reel that the bride taught the groom. It was definitely a crowd pleaser—and a nod to the bride’s grandmother who was not able to attend due to health issues, but who loves a party and especially any dance set to Irish music! The groom really wanted a “cigars in the garden” portion of the evening. He hand selected a variety of cigars and the bride thrifted an antique silver ashtray to create a cigar corner of the garden, which the guests really enjoyed.
If you had one piece of advice for other couples, what would it be?
Wedding planning should be fun (mostly), but it is actual work. Depending on the wedding, doing your own wedding planning—when it’s done right—isn’t really going to save money, and certainly not time: the main benefits are likely going to be for those who have a very specific vision and some experience in working on events. That said, being involved in the planning of your own wedding to whatever degree is going to bring a prospective couple closer and reveal a lot about each person. Lastly, nothing goes according to plan perfectly—the trick is to go into it having some contingencies up your sleeve. The day of our wedding the groom learned that in some awful coincidences four people on one table had independently gotten sick enough to be hospitalized—without telling the bride, he immediately instructed the day-of coordinator to reseat the remaining four people at other tables. The coordinator pointed out that escort cards had already been sealed, to which the groom told her that he had a contingency box for her that contained extra seals, and multiple extra escort cards. That’s the kind of contingency you can plan for. You have no idea who or what will go wrong, but the ways they can go wrong—wrong in a “normal” way—are generally finite and can be preempted. And no need to worry about “catastrophe” level events that have no remedy—they have no remedy and they can’t be foreseen, so don’t worry about things out of anyone’s control.
Event Venue / Cosmos Club / www.CosmosClub.org / n/a
Dress Designer / Cathye Brada / www.CathyeBrada.com / www.Instagram.com/CathyeBrada
Cake Designer / Sticky Fingers Bakery / www.StickyFingersBakery.com / www.Instagram.com/EatStickyFingers
Makeup Artist / Miss Jordan Simpson / www.MissJordanSimpson.com / www.Instagram.com/MissJordanSimpson
Hair Stylist / Styled by Anna Fazio / www.StyledByAnnaFazio.com / www.Instagram.com/StyledByAnnaFazio
Event Planner / Schilling Wedding Planning / www.SchillingWeddingPlanning.com / www.Instagram.com/SchillingWeddingPlanning
Digital Photographer / Stephanie Lee / www.MartyrAndLeePhotography.com / www.Instagram.com/MartyrAndLeePhotography
Film Photographer / Johnny Martyr / www.JohnnyMartyr.com / www.Instagram.com/JohnnyMartyrPhoto
Publisher at The White Wren and Bajan Wed, Award Winning Photography + Videographer at Live View Studios, Dad, 80s music lover, crunchy health advocate
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