The Quest of Reception Site - Part I

This is probably all hindsight view now to recall our quest of reception site hunting.  Being able to host our reception at Walt Disney Concert Hall (WDCH) was a perfect decision and I wouldn't change my mind if we started all over. But still, it was quite a journey to get there, so we'll start from the beginning.

After proudly booking the Wayfarers Chapel in such a swift manner, the mission of flying down to LA in March for scouting was a logical next step.  We got some tip from friends that good sites are normally booked at least a year in advance.  Having that in mind, we started the mission.  I searched through various of websites: wedding wire, the knots, project wedding, ... etc, all the popular and non popular ones. Also just went to google map, zoom to the big LA area and search for "wedding reception".  Kudos to Google, a lot of great ones came up.  As organized as I am (okay, that was a joke.), here's the proof of the map with all the candidates that I filtered down to.  (I'm not giving Chris any credit for this and he'd agree.) We already had WDCH on the list and I was in love with it for a long time. But at that moment we both had the assumption that we wouldn't be able to afford it.

View Wedding Reception Candidates in a larger map

Two and half days we covered a lot of ground in big Los Angeles area.  Everyday was at least a 100 miles drive.  We started off right at one of the Patina Group restaurants called Leatherby's Cafe Rouge in Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall.  It locates in Costa Mesa and the stunning building was the key thing that drew us there.  Now you see that we have a thing with funky looking places.



It wasn't open on that day (my bad on not doing the homework!). So we simply walked around the building and left.

Continue on with a beautiful sunny day we headed to Huntington Beach, just about 30 miles south of Palos Verdes but the drive would take up to almost an hour because the only way to reach there is via Highway #1.  The plan was to start from there then drive down along the coast to Newport and then Laguna Beach. 

The coast was beautiful as usual SoCal, the hotels had typical 5 star resort atmosphere. The ballrooms were okay.  We were not particularly thrilled by any one of them and yet the minimum cost was definitely OMG-California high. 

Hyatt Regency at Hungtington Beach - 1

Hyatt Regency at Hungtington Beach - 2

Going back in time, it seemed that everyone but me and my betrothed by default knew how much a wedding could cost or how huge the whole wedding business in U.S is.  We didn't learn that till the very moment when the event sales handed us their beautifully binded brochure.  While digesting the humongus cost estimate, the standard ballroom didn't impress us enough.

Hilton at Huntington Beach

Marriot at Newport Beach - 1

Marriott at Newport Beach

Moving on with some financial shock wave in mind,  we came all the way to a place that I was very excited about and actually had quite some conversation with them prior to the visit.  Seven Degrees.

Their reviews online were all 5 stars, the wedding pictures that people had were amazing looking.  I was almost certain that this one might work out.  It wasn't easy to find this place as it stood among all the neighborhood buildings despite the unique looking itself.

Seven Degrees - Outside

Inside the building, the space was big enough for approx. 130 people and all the professional lighting, sound equipment were all built in already.  We visited right before another wedding's ceremony, so we could see their setup.  It was definitely clean and elegant.

Seven Degrees - Reception Room

Since we've already had some conversation over emails beforehand, we took quite some time there to talk about details with the owner.  She gave us some price break for the whole package and definitely seemed to be passionate about hosting wedding events (kinda basic attitude you'd think right? Actually you'd be surprised that a lot of places didn't give you that vibe.).  Now here's the thing, we both could imagine ourselves hosting event there but none of us said: This is it! Frankly speaking, my excitement was slightly diminished since I was concerned that the place was buried among other random buildings and the surrounding neighborhood was simply odd. Well, it was still early in the game.  Nothing was set in stone yet.  However, it was definitely on our list.

The first day was quite productive but we were still putting hopes on the 2nd day which was Rancho Palos Verdes itself, Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach at the north side. (To Be Continued.)

Wayfarers Chapel

It's been 18 days since our wedding and I always wanted to write down more about the whole process so we could remember everything years later.  So let me start with the holy place where we vowed to be with each other for richer or for poor - Wayfarers Chapel.

People thought that it might have taken us forever to decide on where to get married but we booked the Wayfarers within 5 days after our engagement. We saw this chapel on one of my favorite TV show: The O.C.  and both of us fell in love with the chapel instantly.  We joked about how we're going to get married there even before the engagement.  To quote myself back then it was "If I ended up marrying anyone (so there's no pressure!), I'd get married at this beautiful place!" It was a no brainer after the engagement for us to make a decision.  Chris remembered it.  We set the date and then we booked the chapel without personally ever been there at all.



The chapel locates at the tip of Rancho Palo Verdes, California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  It was designed by Lloyd Wright who is the son of the famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.  The chapel is also called the Glass Chapel as its roof and walls are made with glasses which is the contemporary theme that we tried to infuse through out our wedding.  As the warm sun shining through the glasses into the chapel, surrounded by flowers, trees and the ocean breeze, together with the chapel bell ringing signaling you that this is the moment, everyone there couldn't help but indulge in the atmosphere of happiness.

We made it down to LA 3 months after engagement for scouting our reception place and also visiting the Wayfarers Chapel. Our good friends Simon and Maggie went with us and thanks for their pictures that you see here.  As soon as we arrived, we knew we made the right decision. (It's not like we could backout at all. =P)  The view was just breathtaking. It was a clear day too. As you could see in the picture, even it wasn't at Spring time, it was just purely gorgeous.  Bathing under the sun, the serenity simply crawled into mind while walking in the chapel.  It was perfect.

The contribution to the chapel was $2500 and tax deductable but could not transferred from one couple to another. (So you'd better be sure!)  I didn't know that $2500 for a ceremony facility rental is considered above average till much later. However, a little advice for future bride is, all the cost should be budgeted as a whole instead of individually.  In our case, the chapel provided the reverend, musician and coordinator for the 2-hour event. Since it's so beautiful by itself, any extra floral decoration would just ruin it.  Therefore, we didn't have to spend money on musician, reverend and floral decoration at ceremony which made the overal cost fairly reasonable.  The ceremony usually won't take more than 20-25 minutes, so 2 hours is considered to be enough. However, as much as we love taking photos, it was very tight for us to do some wedding portrait, family photos and such on the day of.  But quite frankly the wedding day itself is usually packed already no matter where you hold your ceremony/reception.  I think it went pretty well for our day eventually.

Our guests already knew that we ended up choosing the reception place a little bit far from here.  The story is worth another blog post so you'll know about it later.  However, everyone made it! That's the most important part.

I want another different post about the actual wedding day. So we'll save the part about the actual ceremony for later.

囍 Double Happiness

Many of our guests already got our invitation. It was quite a process to finally get everything together with an extra personal touch on it.  I'm glad that most people are so kind to give me some positive feedback of those little extra effort - The Double Happiness stamp and the wax seal with our initials.  

We had our invitation designed and printed via Diana Chou Designs.  Flipping through all the samples that she has was quite a challenge since we had no color theme or styles in our mind.  We knew the keywords - simple, elegant and contemporary and yet it's like telling people that "This wine has dark plum, smoke and cherry flavor with loads of meat and coffee notes." And you'll be like "WHAT??"  So we just went with our instinct.  We however did learn a lot about so many different color and font.  Taupe, apricot, misty rose, pale egg blue,... Caslon, script, bickham, ... . You picked the shape, the design, the font, the color, ... Everything could be customized.  It was a true test for two engineers.  Again, the instinct and Diana's patience and suggestions guided us to what we have today.  We were very happy when they arrived.

 

Initially we were just going to stuff in some direction info and then sent it out directly.  However my Asian blood gradually kicked in.  Fully western style, with all the English prints, this is far from what we used to know in terms of Chinese wedding invitation.  They are supposed to be red and supposed to have a gigantic 囍 - double happiness, all over the place.  The origin of this double happiness was from a poet, Wang Anshi in Northern Song Dynasty who got the good news of him gotten the first place of the Imperial Exam during his wedding ceremony.  With two great things happening at the same time, the poet wrote two Chinese character - 喜 (happiness), next to each other on the door. Ever since then this is considered as a lucky sign in Chinese's wedding. The full version of the story could be found here in English and here in Chinese.  I encourage you to read them since they are quite interesting. =)

To incorporate this lucky symbol, I found zazzle.com that let you customize your own stamps. Double happiness obviously is popular enough to have many styles for me to choose from.   Of course they cost a little bit more than the stamp's face value.  But I think people actually appreciate it when they saw them. =)

Next thing is direction sheets that we stuffed in.  I'll spare you with the tedious detail of how I tried to find the Adobe Caslon Semi Bold Small Cap font to match our invitation font, also the translucent paper selection plus 10 different mock-up in terms of color and layout.  They obviously doesn't look as professional but it's kinda cohesive in my mind.

Now the last step is to put everything together.  The seal, where we got a lot of compliment for was the last personal touch after my horrible hand writing of all the names and addresses on the envelope.  I had that idea a while ago when I was in a small paper store at Bridgeport mall.  By the time we made up our mind to buy it, they ran out of letter "C".  While last name initial works just as great and even better,  here we have "Q" and "T" sealed on each invitation.  Each seal requires 3 steps,  dispense the wax with glue gun, ice the stamp, and then stamp on the wax and let it cool.  2:30AM in the morning, I powered through sealing all the invitations.  Some might not survived through the post office's stamping machine which we should've requested hand-stamp only, but oh well, the invitation made it to your home safely and that's the most important thing.  Now you see how much effort we put in, remember to RSVP!!! =)

Lastly, I'd like to thank our dear friend Teri and Noah for coming over to help out putting everything together. Well, Teri did the actual help while Noah helped keeping Chris company by playing video games.  They always enjoy that extra bromance whenever they could. 

Yo Ho Yo Ho~

Not pirate's life but a Caribbean trip for me!

We just booked our honeymoon at Sandal's Resort in Jamaica!

There was a debate of which kind of honeymoon we'd like. Paris was originally the ideal place in my mind, but we're simply one year away from our sabbatical and we did target Europe as the main destination, it makes sense to save Paris till that time.

Now it's left with tropical islands. Chris has been doing research with his ultimate Frommer's travel book. He wouldn't travel to any country unless there's an issue of Frommer's for it. With that bible, the most economic and carefree option seems to be the all-inclusive resort and Sandal's naturally falls into that category. Many people might have considered places like Maldives, Bora Bora and etc. Well, why not go to those tropical paradise that's just right next to us? St Lucia, Puerto Rico, Grand Caymans,.. and so on. After getting disoriented with gazillions of islands and crossed out those unaffordable luxurous private island like Calivigny Island. We made up our mind to go to Jamaica at Sandal's and then to Miami for couple days afterwards. Also, Sandal's is having a really good discounts right now and we did get a pretty good deal. It'll be some carefree vacation on the first few days to shake off some wedding planning stress, followed by a little bit of sightseeing in Miami then the trip will wrap up with my birthday. How lovely is that? The only thing that I'll be embracing is my new title. Chris has registered me while booking the honeymoon suite with the title "Mrs.".

Kenneth Yan

I haven't had a chance to formally thank our good friend Kenneth Yan, who just had a beautiful wedding in summer last year in Portland. After their big wedding, Kenneth and his lovely wife, Kitty spent a good 4 hours taking pictures of us in Portland for us to put on our website. So yea, the picture at landing page of the wedding website is from Kenneth and I should've put a credit there long time ago (I did it if you haven't noticed!!). We acted really awekward in the first place, with people walking by around us. Definitely took awhile for both of us to warm up. This happened before the Taiwan glamour shot, so I guess we had a little bit of warm up run here already and it helped a lot. Portland is a lovely small city. We simply just cruise around from Pearl district to the union station and then a steal bridge that I really don't remember the name now. I was wearing the dress that I promised Quam that I would wear more than once since the engagement party. Well, who doesn't love Missoni? Here is to Kenneth: Thank you and Kitty again! Let me know if you already have a studio for us to promote!

Back on track

Having a long engagement does give us some room to scatter all those ToDo's apart but not quite that easy since we're still remotely planning.  As if we're having a "destination wedding".

We went back to Taiwan to have our wedding glamour photo taken from Julia Wedding News(茱莉亞新婚情報).  We had a blast dressing up all fancy and had a 15 hour shooting day.  Surprisingly the groom had a lot of fun too! I think he enjoyed it more than I do.   Basically we changed five different outfits, went to Beito Park(北投公園) and Dan Shuay(淡水) and the old building next to the studio. The rest of the shooting scenes are inside the studio with different color background.  I wanted to haver some "classic" photos where bride and groom are holding hands looking directly at camera. That's something timeless and will never go out of the style. Well, when we said something classic or timeless, it usually means old fashion and yet it's so very true.

I also picked out my wedding gown for the day of and the evening gown for the reception.  The wedding glamour photo and look change during recption are only "Asian theme" that I couldn't resist even though the rest of the wedding stuff are in full western style.  Something fun to do.

After we're back from Taiwan, the first task is to look for my new makeup artist and I really hope that I have some luck this time despite the unpleasant setback previously.  Thanks to my dear bridesmaids especially to Chichi.  She helped me ranked all makeup artist candidates and eased my mind on some concerns that I have.  Ladies! There are just something that only your girlfriends understand!!

We're going to Southern California once again in January to nail down most of our vendors including DJ, lightings, wedding coordinator, florists, wedding invitation and makeup artist.  We have to thank our good friends Candace/Vinnie. They just had a lovely wedding in San Diego in summer 2010 and they also live in Portland.  We're facing a lot of similar situations and I like everything in their wedding.  Therefore, lots of referal from them and we're very grateful.

Meanwhile, Quam and I will have a little date night at Walt Disney Concert Hall during our January visit to enjoy a concert.

Everything is slowly shaping up together.  And what's our color theme????
Well, I still don't know yet.. :)

Here's the sneak peak of the day of glamour shot. :)

Grace Lin sucks!

As if I jinxed it by posting "Makeup Artist Booked!". 
That makeup artist that I was happily booked backed out on me.
We signed the contract and her cousin is getting married on the same day that I'm getting married and so I got skrewed.

This is just frustrating and upsetting. I spent the entire day being grumpy and anti-social.
The truth is, who else besides me would care about it???

Grace Lin sucks!!!