A Pre-Dawn Hakone Ceremony Before the Gardens Opened

Portraits Through the Oldest Japanese Garden in the West

Hakone is the oldest Japanese-style residential garden in the Western Hemisphere, its koi ponds, arched bridges, and wooden viewing pavilions kept close to what they have always been. Violette and Matt took their portraits through it while the light was still soft and the garden still empty. The whole wedding party crowded in together, the bridesmaids laughing in their purples, Matt in teal at the center with Violette's blue gown and her lavender-and-white bouquet in the middle of it. The couple leaned into each other on the runner, her painted skirts pooling on the gravel, the manicured hedges dark green behind them.

After photos wrapped, everyone drove down for the reception while the day was still going, and the garden filled up behind them with visitors who had no idea a wedding had just come and gone before them.

Lunch at Il Fornaio, an Out-of-State Remote-Planned Wedding

The celebration moved to Il Fornaio in Palo Alto, its dining room warm with exposed brick and a big painted mural of bakers at a stone pizza oven behind the tables. Violette changed into a second dress for it, a white eyelet gown with a high neck and short sleeves, her pearls at her throat. She and Matt had their first dance in front of the mural, then a father-daughter dance, an emotional one, the two of them holding on in front of the painted brick oven.

Once the guests were seated, champagne was poured and the toasts went around — a run of them, one guest in a lilac linen suit standing to speak while Matt looked up from his chair. The cake came from Sweet C's Bake Shoppe: white buttercream with a cluster of lavender roses and greenery on top, cut to show soft layers threaded with fruit and jam. Out by the pool, statues standing along the water, the couple posed with the cake and a low arrangement of purple and white blooms, flutes of champagne lined up on the wood table. What they had built from another state held all the way through, the early Hakone ceremony, the garden portraits, and the long unhurried lunch, right to the last of it.