Transforming our Wedding into a Purposeful & Immersive World: Six Lessons From The Art of Gathering

Written By Meredith Verzino

How to Use The Art of Gathering and my Design Principles to Create Your Intentional Wedding

I discovered Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering on We Can Do Hard Things – Episode #256 and felt lightning move through my whole body. The way she explains using intentional choices to transform a gathering into a meaning-making experience sounded exactly like what I practice as an interior designer: design that sculpts how people feel, connect, and remember.

So I treated our wedding like a gathering to be designed, not a template to be followed. Yes, the aesthetics mattered (they always do for me), but the point wasn’t décor for décor’s sake. The point was to create a temporary, golden world that told our story—and invited our people to live in it with us. As I wrote in my Instagram wedding series, this wasn’t just “a big day.” It was a creative process that grew me as an artist and a host. With Priya’s framework in one hand and my design toolkit in the other, I set out to create a wedding that felt like our life in Colorado: shimmering aspens, warm light, adventurous spirit, and the calm that finds you in the mountain tops.

Key Lesson 1: Make a Purpose That’s Specific, Unique, and Disputable (and use it as your bouncer)

A wedding is an event category, and many event categories come with their unconscious, circular logic purpose. To gather at a wedding “to celebrate love” is… lovely—and not very useful. Purpose is useful when it’s specific, unique, and disputable. It dares to take a stand, which gives you a decision filter (your “bouncer”) for everything from the guest list to the venue to the tiny, tactile details.

How we applied it

The traditional template waiting for us looked like this: St. Louis church ceremony, Forest Park photos, banquet hall reception. Familiar, convenient, and beloved by many people we love. But it didn’t reflect the reality or energy of our relationship. We met by chance at a Denver soccer game, built a life exploring the mountains, and feel most ourselves in the fall under a canopy of golden aspens. We don’t practice Catholic or Greek Orthodox traditions; our weekend hiking became our ritual. So we named a purpose bold enough to guide hard choices.

We used the author’s chart to arrive at our purpose(s):

Design lens: let purpose drive the design concept

In design, a concept is the through-line or theme that every decision must obey. Your purpose should become your concept.

Take the purpose(s) you wrote and condense them into one over capsulating design concept. For example, we took our four disputable purposes below and distilled them into one design concept:

  • Honoring the serendipity of Hamat, Lebanon and St. Louis, Missouri meeting—and choosing Colorado as home

  • Embodying our life together—adventure, curiosity, creativity—in a fall mountain setting

  • Weaving cultures and distances in one room, inviting guests into the world we built

  • Expressing design as love, turning intention into atmosphere guests could feel


Our design concept: Invite our families into the Colorado world we built—golden, adventurous, cross-cultural—for one night, and ask them to experience it with us.

Fall Vogue, for short. 

Describe your Design Concept in Details:

  • Atmosphere/Location/ Time of Year: an elegant mountain town in Colorado, peak fall foliage

  • Evocative descriptors: golden, warm, euphoric, luxurious,peaceful, serene, adventurous, joyous, elevated, timeless, sculptural, soft, unexpected, vogue, chic, organic, natural, editorial, understated elegance

  • Materials & palette: Aspen yellow, pearl warm white, beige, chocolate browns, champagne, mocha, silks, timbers, velvet

When the purpose is clear, the built environment stops being decoration and becomes a story. To make sure the purpose of our gathering was clear, we even included it in our ceremony programs, so guests could read it before the ceremony began. This reminded people why they were there and set the tone for the experience.

How to Use It in Your Own Wedding

  • Rethink Traditions
     Start by naming the template you’re expected to follow—church, banquet hall, DJ—and then deliberately brainstorm alternatives. What rituals, places, or gestures would feel more like you, even if they’re untraditional? This reframing helps you design with intention instead of defaulting to habit.

  • Fill Out the Purpose Chart
     Draft three specific, unique, and disputable purposes for your wedding. Let them filter not only aesthetics, but also who belongs inside the gathering and where it belongs.
    → Tip: Put this chart on a presentation slide. Keep it visible as a reminder to yourself and your partner whenever decisions get muddy.

  • Create a Design Concept
     Tie your purposes into one emotional through-line. Ask: What atmosphere embodies our purpose? What feelings should guests walk away with? Then define the palette, textures, and vibe of your alternate world.
    → Inspiration Sources: Pinterest and Instagram (search creators like Anti-Bride, Wed Vibes, Vogue, well-known florists, stationery designers and wedding designers). For Colorado-specific inspiration, browse Rocky Mountain Bride. Fashion magazines can also sharpen your editorial eye.

  • Build a Visual Design Board
     Don’t let your design live scattered across a Pinterest board. Curate your top inspiration into one slide—think florals, table designs, ceremony design, couple’s fashion, invitations, and fabric/material references. Add Pantone or Benjamin Moore swatches to lock in your palette, and include descriptors that capture the mood.
    → Pro tip: This slide is vital whether you’re designing yourself or hiring a planner. It becomes both your filter (for bridal party color or table scape décor) and your visual communicator. I shared mine with vendors via Google Slides, so updates flowed seamlessly without endless back-and-forth emails.

My original, unpolished Fall Vogue Concept presentation slide

When you ground your wedding in a clear purpose, supported by a distilled design concept and visual board, every choice becomes easier. Instead of chasing trends, you’re designing a world—one that tells your story and invites your people to step inside it.

Questions that sharpen your purpose:

  • What about this season of our lives deserves to be witnessed now?

  • How should guests be changed by being there—what will they newly understand or feel?

  • What choice would unsettle a few but make the experience truer for us?

  • If our wedding were an alternate world, what would guests step into the moment they arrive?

Key Lesson 2: Let Purpose Shape Who and Where

If purpose is the bouncer at the door, then who and where are the first things it guards. Without that filter, gatherings quickly get hijacked by politeness—guest lists bloated by obligation, venues chosen for convenience rather than meaning. When you let purpose decide, clarity follows.

Who: A Purpose-Driven Guest List

A wedding invite list is never just names on paper—it’s a living expression of your purpose. Inclusion for inclusion’s sake may seem generous, but often it dilutes the experience for everyone. True generosity means protecting the core of what you’re creating.

For us, this meant facing painful truths. My grandmother, and Fares’s grandmother, aunts, and cousins couldn’t attend due to age or visa restrictions. They were invited, but we didn’t uproot our wedding to chase convenience—because in our situation, there was no such thing. With Fares’s family spread across the world (many in Lebanon) and mine anchored in the Midwest, there was no single location that would have been “easy.” Hosting in St. Louis would still have meant long travel for many, and Lebanon—though dear to us—would have been inaccessible to most guests. Instead, we chose to stand firm in our purpose: to let our guests experience the magic of a Colorado fall.

This wasn’t easy, but it required us to ask the hardest and most honest question:

Who is this gathering for, first?

Purpose taught us that exclusion, when honest, is not cruelty. It is clarity. Inclusion in the name of politeness can actually hijack a gathering. By contrast, standing in the truth of your purpose protects the experience for everyone. You love your people—but you also love yourself enough to protect your presence and joy.

In the end, purpose itself did much of the filtering. Guests decided whether the distance, time, and cost were worth the investment. That freed us from guilt: if our purpose resonated, they came; if it didn’t, they blessed us from afar.

Where: A Venue as a Nudge

If the guest list expresses purpose in people, the venue expresses it in place. A location is never neutral—it nudges your guests into a certain version of themselves. Too often couples default to cost or convenience, but purpose demands more: choose a venue that amplifies your story.

For us, there was no alternative to Colorado. Our purpose was to celebrate the life we built in the mountains. No savings elsewhere could replace that truth.

We chose Vail in October, when golden aspens shimmer across the valley. Our venue, The Donovan Pavilion, offered soaring timber trusses, mountain-framed windows, and chandeliers that evoked the grand, editorial feeling of our Fall Vogue theme. Outside, the patio ceremony placed our guests directly in the aspens and evergreens, immersed in the landscape that had shaped our love story. Our hotel, The Hythe, matched the opulence and elevated aesthetic as we got ready with our bridal parties.

The venue wasn’t just a backdrop—it became the architecture of our memories. It carried the golden, serene, adventurous essence of who we are.

In Colorado, your pet can legally serve as a witness and sign your marriage license, a detail that felt beautifully fitting for us. Our dog, Noodle, is the golden thread woven through our everyday life, so including him in our ceremony was never a question. As our ring bearer, he trotted down the aisle radiating the same light and joy that inspired the entire day. His presence infused the ceremony with ease, laughter, and warmth, the kind of unspoken energy that draws people closer. In many ways, Noodle acted as our gentle “bouncer” for both who and where, grounding our gathering in authenticity. He carried our purpose as effortlessly as he carried his toy ring—spreading joy, softening formality, and inviting everyone deeper into the love that built our world.

In short: When who and where align with why, a gathering transcends convenience and becomes the most honest version of itself.

Design Lens: Let Purpose + Design Concept Drive Where

Think of your venue as part of your design toolkit. Just as you wouldn’t pick a fabric or color without considering its story, don’t pick a place without weighing what it says.

  • Start with your design concept. Revisit the descriptors you’ve already named for your vision. Does the venue echo them in its materiality, setting, and feel?

  • Every layer matters. The time of year, the natural environment, and the architectural details of the venue all add meaning.

  • Consider how the venue frames your people. A venue not only houses your guests—it shapes how they see each other, and how they experience your story.

Purpose and design together transform a venue from backdrop to embodiment.

How to Use It for Your Own Wedding

  • Audit your guest list with purpose in hand. Ask who fulfills it, who threatens it, and who’s only there by obligation. Protect your emotional space.

  • Choose a venue that embodies your purpose. Let the setting become part of the story you’re telling—not just a line item in your budget.

Questions to Ask to Sharpen Who and Where

For Who

  • Who fulfills the gathering’s purpose?

  • Who threatens it—even unintentionally?

  • Who are we tempted to invite out of politeness, habit, or obligation?

  • Who drains more energy than they give?

  • Are we willing to disappoint others before we disappoint ourselves?

  • Can you let your purpose be a natural filter?

For Where

  • What story does this place tell before we add a single flower or chair?

  • Does the architecture and landscape align with our design concept (rustic, contemporary, coastal, Tuscan, classic, mountainous)?

  • Will this venue nudge guests into the version of themselves we want to see at this gathering?

  • Does the season, light, and setting reinforce our purpose—or fight against it?

  • Are we choosing for cost/convenience, or for resonance with our why?

Key Lesson 3: Host with Generous Authority

One of the most misunderstood truths about gatherings is that hosts hold power—and too often, they refuse to claim it. We tend to glorify the “chill host,” the one who hangs back and lets the night unfold naturally. But a gathering left to its own devices will rarely align with its purpose. To create the world you envision, you must embrace your role as host with generous authority: leading firmly, but always in service of the greater good.

Generous authority is not about control for its own sake. It is about recognizing that your leadership protects your guests, equalizes them, and connects them to one another. It means making peace with the reality that sometimes you’ll be disliked for a decision—whether that’s enforcing an unplugged ceremony or setting a dress code—but that decision is what allows the whole group to rise into the experience you’re designing. Structure helps good gatherings the same way restrictions help good design.

Protect Your Guests

Protection isn’t about policing—it’s about creating conditions where everyone can relax, trust, and enjoy themselves. At our wedding, we protected our guests through boundaries: asking them to dress in Fall Formal attire so they could step into the opulence of a Colorado autumn; asking for an unplugged ceremony so the moment could remain sacred. Not everyone understood these rules in the moment, but they were in service of something larger: shielding our gathering from distractions, uneven energy, and the intrusion of addictive technology. Protection sometimes means saying “no” on behalf of the group, even if individuals bristle at first.

(I included the Wedding Party Colors as an FYI, because some women want to avoid wearing the same colors as the bridal party. This is a much different tone than “don’t wear these colors.”)

We learned firsthand what happens when protective boundaries aren’t clearly communicated. We had asked for an unplugged ceremony, but somewhere between planning and execution, the message didn’t reach everyone. Without a clear announcement at the start, guests understandably pulled out their phones, unaware they were crossing a boundary meant to preserve the intimacy of the moment. Our planner tried her best to redirect attention quietly, but without that shared understanding established early on, the atmosphere we hoped to protect slipped away. What was intended to safeguard presence and privacy became an unspoken rule no one knew to follow. This experience reminded us that every boundary, no matter how thoughtful, depends on clear and consistent communication—not as an act of control, but as an act of care for the world you’ve worked so hard to create.

Equalize Your Guests

Every gathering has a hierarchy—spoken or unspoken. At weddings, it’s especially sharp: the couple, the bridal party, the parents, the extended family, the friends. Equalizing doesn’t mean pretending this hierarchy doesn’t exist; it means softening its edges so more people can belong. We approached this by framing our wedding as a blending of cultures—Lebanese, Italian, and Colorado—so that every guest could bring their own heritage into the larger purpose. Our Fall Formal dress code created a collective aesthetic, elevating everyone equally into the world we imagined. Equalizing isn’t about erasing roles; it’s about reminding guests that each person carries something vital into the shared story.

Connect Your Guests

The ultimate success of a gathering is measured in the connections it sparks. Our job as hosts was to seed and model those connections. We created a map at the welcome party to show where everyone had traveled from, visually connecting strangers before conversations even began. We curated food and drinks—Italian wines, Lebanese kebabs, fall-inspired cocktails—that gave guests natural conversation points. Every introduction, every shared plate, every “you two have to meet” moment was an act of hospitality. By holding the invisible string of connection throughout the weekend, we helped guests feel not only closer to us, but also to one another.

Being a generous authority means writing the “invisible script” of your event—rules, invitations, instructions—that align everyone to the purpose you’ve defined. At our wedding, that invisible string tied together Colorado’s golden fall, our cultural roots, and the collective presence of our families and friends. The truth is: hosting is not democratic, just like design isn’t. Someone has to hold the vision, and everyone else benefits from that clarity. To lead generously is to hold the reins firmly, with kindness, for the sake of the whole.

The Design Lens

Design thrives on structure. A designer knows that rules aren’t limitations; they’re frameworks for beauty and meaning. Hosting with generous authority is the same: it’s about setting boundaries that free people to fully immerse themselves. Just as a design palette guides the creation of a space, the rules and signals of your event guide how guests show up and engage. When the structure is clear, people relax into it—and that’s when connection happens.

How to Use This for Your Own Wedding

  • Set the Tone Early: Your invitations and website are not just logistics; they’re signals of what kind of world you’re asking guests to step into. Be explicit.

  • Give Clear Instructions: Don’t shy away from rules. Whether it’s attire, phone use, or ceremony etiquette, clarity feels like care.

  • Hire Intentional Help: A planner or coordinator becomes the temporary authority when you can’t be. Choose someone who understands your purpose and will enforce your invisible script. Other temporary authorities could be: Officiant, Ushers, Bridal Party, Parents - communicate to all these groups effectively

  • Equalize with Intention: Consider dress codes, food, rituals, or table assignments that allow guests to feel like contributors, not just spectators.

  • Design for Connection: Add interactive elements—maps, conversation prompts, shared rituals—that help strangers become community.

The more authority you own as a host, the freer your guests and you will feel to surrender to the world you’ve built for them and yourselves. That’s the paradox of generous authority: firmness creates freedom.

Key Lesson 4: Create a Temporary Alternative World

The most transformative weddings don’t simply gather people in a room—they transport them into another world. A world that exists only once, for one bounded moment in time. This is the magic of creating a temporary alternative world: through intentional rules, thresholds, and moments of awe, you lead your guests out of ordinary life and into something unrepeatable. It’s a suspension of reality that elevates a milestone into a memory.

Priming: Hosting Before the First Handshake

Your wedding begins long before the ceremony. It begins at the moment of discovery—the invitation, the save-the-date, the wedding website. This is your chance to prime your guests, to signal that they’re entering not just an event but a world. Priming sets the social contract: “Here’s what we are asking of you, and here’s what you will receive in return.” Done well, it awakens anticipation and ensures everyone arrives aligned with the purpose.

For us, that moment of discovery was our Save the Date. Guests opened the envelope to see us standing in a glowing forest of aspens. That wasn’t accidental. I planned our engagement shoot in Crested Butte a year in advance, knowing the fall colors would atmospherically and aesthetically set the tone. It was our way of saying: This is the golden world you’re about to enter. It also gave our guests—many traveling from across the world—a year’s notice to prepare.

That Save the Date linked to our wedding website (we used Minted), which expanded the story generously: photos in autumn light, our love story, details of the weekend, accommodations, and even a color chart for fall-formal attire. It was our first invitation into an alternate world—a golden Colorado autumn woven into our lives.

Wedding Website Template by Minted. Using Minted was seamless for its coordinated Save the Date & QR code-RSVP features.

When the invitations followed, design became the language of priming. While the book suggests material details like fonts or paper don’t matter, I disagree. Design is never incidental. Our invitations—matte pearl paper with distressed edges, chocolate letterpress, and an embossed aspen leaf—weren’t just aesthetic choices, they were signals. They whispered to our guests: Prepare for a luxurious fall gathering, rooted in nature and full of intention.

Priming, at its core, is building anticipation and aligning expectations. Every point of contact—save-the-date, website, invitation—was the opening chapter of our story.

Designer Pro Tip: Keep your stationery to a consistent aesthetic. This gives you an opportunity to create an heirloom shadow box keep-sake to display in your home for all the wonderful years of your marriage. Ours encapsulates every piece of stationery including - invitations, save-the-dates, aspen ornaments, ceremony program, vow booklets, cocktail napkins, bows from our ‘welcome’ sign, and real Aspen leaves preserved from 10.12.24.

Kindling: Keeping the Fire Alive

Priming evolves into kindling—moments of connection that sustain excitement before the main event. These may be showers, bachelor/ette trips, or pre-wedding gatherings. These events were held for each of us, but for the collective, it was our Welcome Party.

Looking back, I wish we had renamed it into something playful yet elevated—like Golden Hour in Vail or Welcome to Our Falling in Love. Naming sparks intrigue and primes guests to enter your story with imagination.

At the event itself, we used a slideshow map of where each guest traveled from, layered with photos of our families and childhoods. It wasn’t just entertainment—it was kindling. It honored the journey, built community, and acted as the threshold moment that pre-ushered guests from their wide world into our fall wonderland.

Thresholds: Ushering Guests Across the Line

Guests don’t simply stumble into an alternate world—they must be ushered. Passageways and thresholds are the rituals of crossing over.

At our ceremony, thresholds began at the stone pathway leading back into Donovan Pavilion outdoor patio, guided by a welcome sign. The sound of Gore Creek and the aspen grove created a natural threshold that dissolved outside concerns. An open bar before the ceremony carried the celebratory energy from the Welcome party forward.

Our DJ & Saxophonist acted as our threshold from the ceremony & cocktail hour.

Even my cape reveal during cocktail hour became an ushering moment—an embodied signal of luxury, opulence, and energy as the night unfolded.

Later, the escort wall acted as the second major threshold—ushering guests from cocktail hour into the reception. Each person received a preserved aspen leaf ornament, displayed on a board with the message: “We saved you a seat and an aspen leaf.” It was a token of belonging, guiding them deeper into our golden world.

Launching: Start with Wonder, Not Logistics

The opening of a gathering is one of its most powerful moments. Too often it’s squandered on logistics, when it should awaken wonder.

Our ceremony & reception launch was choreographed through design. Guests walked into sculptural floral elements  soaring ceilings, chandeliers, and yellow florals. The cake—sculptural and framed at the architectural center—anchored the awe. Then, Fares and I entered directly into our first dance, “Yellow” by Coldplay, signaling the reception’s shift into joy and celebration.

Honor and Awe: Holding Guests Above and Below

The art of hosting is balancing awe and honor. Awe says: “Look at this world we’ve created for you.” Honor says: “Your presence completes it.”

Our reception design embodied this balance. Every detail—floral sculptures playing with negative space, bowls of Lebanese nuts, hand-calligraphed name cards, ribbon-coded meal markers, raw-edge stones, donut towers, gold candle votives & silverware —was chosen to awe, but also to honor. Each detail enhanced the purpose with the color or texture selection. Each seat said: You are worth this beauty.

Fuse: From Collection to Community

A group becomes a community when they recognize not just the hosts, but one another through storytelling or a ritual. For us, speeches fused our guests into one collective.

My dad’s speech naming the sacrifices of our farthest travelers  turned a roomful of individuals into a bonded community. Their words acknowledged presence, sacrifice, and love—christening the celebration as a shared story. The Best Man & Matron on Honor speech bonded the community on our love story.

Above and Beyond: Purpose in the First Breath

To go above and beyond is not about extravagance, it’s about embodiment. In the first breath, your guests should feel why you called them together. When you succeed, the temporary world you’ve created lingers long after.

Design Lens: Crafting an Alternate World

Design is the invisible architecture of an alternate world. Every element—color, texture, layout, floral forms, circulation, and phase—acts as a cue. Guests read these cues like signals, moving deeper into the golden world with each chapter of the day:

  • Save-the-Date, Website & Invitations → The aspen-forest imagery on the save-the-date, a website coded with fall and our love story, and invitations with organic deckled edges, an embossed leaf, and rich chocolate tones all prime expectation and define the aesthetic and social contract.

  • Welcome Party → A communal “arrival” into Vail’s fall setting. The traveler map, note-writing ritual for the five-year wine box, abundant food and wine—each touch warms the room, builds community, and sparks participation.

  • Ceremony → Sculptural florals framed by aspens and the sound of Gore Creek. Nature becomes the set, quieting the outside world and focusing attention.

  • Cocktail Hour → Saxophone-meets-deep-house + your cape reveal shift the energy. Heritage-inspired bites and wines bring your cross-cultural story to the senses.

  • Reception → An escort wall that functions as a threshold, the cake centered on the room’s architecture, golden sculptural florals, and layered, luxurious details create awe. The preserved aspen-leaf ornament becomes the token that bridges the temporary world back home.

How to Use It in Your Own Wedding

  • Think in Phases
     Map the guest journey as chapters: arrival → ceremony → cocktail hour → approach the bar → enter reception → find seat → dance → exit. Assign a threshold signal to each (a sound cue, object, path, toast, or reveal) so transitions are felt, not just scheduled

  • Storyboard Your Space
     Pull the venue floor plan and label each moment with a letter. Create one slide per letter with the moment’s name, purpose, and design ingredients.
    Example: E — Reception Table Design: list and annotate linens, florals, candle heights, menus, place cards, table numbers, and any sensory cues (music tempo, lighting dim).
    Use (or adapt) your slideshow format as a template so decisions ladder up to purpose. See my wedding presentation at the end of this section as a template to follow.

  • Prime Early
     Let stationery, your website, and pre-events build the world before anyone arrives. Ask: What story should guests understand from the first touchpoint? Make sure copy, palette, and materials all point to the purpose

  • Create Thresholds
    Use physical markers (signage, pathways, music shifts, lighting shifts) and symbolic rituals (toasts, tokens) to signal each chapter change. Guests should feel the crossing.

  • Design for Awe and Honor
     Plan one bold, intentional gesture per phase (sculptural florals, escort wall, luxurious tablescapes) for awe. Pair it with one personal touch (handwritten note, culturally meaningful bite, thoughtful favor) for honor. The balance invites both wonder and belonging.

  • Fuse the Collective
     Script at least one unifying ritual—a toast, prayer, short story, or acknowledgment—that names sacrifices, distances traveled, and shared purpose. It turns individuals into a community and locks in meaning.

When you approach your wedding as a temporary alternate world, you’re not just decorating a venue—you’re sculpting an experience that suspends reality, awakens wonder, and turns a milestone into memory.

Key Lesson 5: Invite Realness and Embrace Good Tension

Not every gathering needs to be all light and sweetness. The most meaningful ones invite guests to show up as their real selves—not their polished, “best” selves—and aren’t afraid of a little heat.

Designing for Realness

At our welcome party, we set out a wine box with notes from our guests—letters we’ll open five years from now. It was a simple gesture, but it invited vulnerability. Guests weren’t just showing up for cocktails; they were pausing to reflect on our future together, offering heartfelt words instead of surface chatter.

Realness doesn’t happen on its own—it can be designed. Warm lighting, flickering candles, comforting food, flowing wine: these cues lower defenses. Vulnerability often comes more easily through stories than statements. A toast about a hard decision, a speech that names sacrifice—these moments connect us as humans, not titles or roles.

As a host, you set the tone. If you reveal something real, your guests will follow. Depth is contagious.

Embracing Good Controversy

Priya Parker reminds us that gatherings without tension risk becoming hollow. A little good controversy can breathe life into a wedding: not in the form of family drama, but in the form of naming truths that matter.

For us, this surfaced in the speeches. My dad didn’t just thank people politely—he named the real journeys: friends flying from Australia, Fares’s mom traveling through war, others crossing borders to be present. These weren’t easy stories, but naming them honored the stakes. They added gravity to our joy.

Good controversy, at its heart, is about not hiding from what matters. It helps us clarify values, priorities, and truths. Weddings that acknowledge both light and shadow become more memorable, more human, and more whole.

Design Lens: Crafting for Depth

Design can invite authenticity as much as aesthetics can. Low lighting, intimate table settings, personal tokens, and rituals like letter-writing or storytelling create environments where guests feel safe to go deeper. Speeches and toasts framed as stories—not just thank-yous—turn into rituals of vulnerability.

Even small design choices (a handwritten note at each place setting, a song that stirs nostalgia, a ritual of acknowledgment) can shift a room from polite to real.

How to Use It in Your Own Wedding

  • Warm Up Guests: Add a ritual at your welcome event—a note box, shared memory wall, or prompt that invites heart over surface.

  • Design for Comfort: Use lighting, food, and music to create intimacy and dissolve social armor.

  • Encourage Storytelling: Guide speeches toward stories, not résumés. Stories connect us through vulnerability.

  • Name the Real: Don’t shy away from truth in your hosting. Acknowledge sacrifices, distances, or struggles—it honors your guests and deepens the meaning of their presence.

When you invite realness and allow a little tension, your wedding transcends pleasantries. It becomes a gathering that holds both beauty and truth—an honest celebration of life’s fullness.

Key Lesson 6: Accept There Is an Ending

Every gathering has a beginning, middle, and end. Yet too often, weddings fade out without a true conclusion—hosts letting the event simply stop instead of closing it with intention. A gathering without a proper ending can feel unfinished, like a story without its final chapter.

To host well is to accept a wedding’s mortality: to guide guests not only into the world you’ve created, but also out of it. A strong closing shapes memory, leaves meaning, and ensures your world lingers in the hearts of your guests long after the last glass is cleared.

The Anatomy of Closing

Closings hold two phases: looking inward and turning outward.

  • Looking inward is about reflection: pausing to acknowledge what transpired, what it meant, and bonding one last time as a group.

  • Turning outward prepares guests to reenter the wider world, carrying something of your gathering back into their lives.

A closing that offers both allows your guests to leave full, not unfinished.

Our Closing: Simple but Symbolic

For the inward turn, we kept things simple. The speeches acted as a “last call” moment, while the dance floor served as our ushering ritual. Our DJ announced the final drink orders and last song, which let the night end on a celebratory high instead of petering out.

For the outward turn, we gave each guest a preserved aspen leaf ornament. More than a favor, it was a bridge between our golden Colorado wedding world and their everyday lives. Aspen leaves don’t grow in everyone’s hometown, so the ornament became a permanent symbol of a fleeting experience. It carried the thread of our weekend back into the many corners of the world our guests returned to.

Design Lens: Closing with Intention

Designing for an ending means asking: What do I want guests to carry with them?

  • Inward cues can be environmental: a last toast, a circle around the couple at the final dance song

  • Outward cues are symbolic: a token, gift, or verbal send-off that connects the temporary world of your wedding to your guests’ everyday lives

In our case, speeches, music, and the leaf ornaments choreographed the close. The design spoke not only through aesthetics but also through memory, ensuring the final impression was just as intentional as the first.

How to Use It in Your Own Wedding

  • Don’t Let It Fizzle: Plan a specific closing ritual. Last song, last toast, or last dance—choose a moment that concludes with clarity.

  • Mirror the Opening: Just as thresholds ushered guests in, create rituals that usher them out with meaning.

  • Give a Symbol: Consider a gift or token that bridges your wedding world with your guests’ real lives. Ask: Will this help them remember what we created together?

  • Hold the Exit Line: Decide what final words or gestures you’ll leave with your guests. Let it echo your purpose—heartfelt, not logistical.

When you accept your wedding’s ending, you honor its impermanence. And paradoxically, it is that very impermanence that allows the memory to endure. 

Closing Notes

Looking back, what I gained from designing our wedding this way wasn’t just a beautiful day—it was a deeper understanding of how design can shape connection, memory, and meaning. Our wedding wasn’t a template to execute; it was a world to design. Each lesson became a tool: a disputable purpose to act as the bouncer, who and where to align the cast and setting, generous authority to protect, equalize, and connect, a temporary alternate world to transport, realness and good tension to keep it human, and an intentional ending to seal the memory. Design was the through-line, not as decoration but as storytelling—a sequence of thresholds, gestures, and cues that helped our people feel why we gathered.

If there’s a thread to carry home, it’s this: gatherings change us when we dare to choose. Choose a specific why. Choose the right people and place. Choose the rules that free everyone to belong. Choose beauty that honors your guests—and truth that honors the moment. Then, when it’s time, choose to end well. Like a golden aspen preserved in an ornament, a well-designed gathering is both fleeting and enduring; it lives for one night and, somehow, forever. If you’re planning a wedding, or any gathering, I’d encourage you to pick up The Art of Gathering and reflect on one question: What is the true purpose of your event? Your answer just might transform not only the gathering itself but also the way it lives on in memory.

Fall Vogue Design: Instagram Series

Every detail of our wedding was designed with purpose—from the golden leaves that inspired our palette to the boundaries that protected our presence. If you’re curious how design can shape emotion, connection, and memory, I invite you to explore the full Instagram series below. Each chapter unpacks a key lesson from The Art of Gathering and how we brought it to life through our own celebration—a story of beauty, intention, and the art of designing how people feel.

Vendors


Meredith Verzino https://merzinodesignco.com
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My First (solo) Interior Design Project