Adeline and Hunter chose to do a private elopement in Big Sur two weeks before the bigger wedding. Back in LA, they hosted a party at Mica Studios, huge studio warehouse which they styled with mid-century style furniture they bought mostly on Facebook marketplace.

They did a tattoo exchange in place of a ring exchange. They both tattooed each others initials on their ring fingers. As the bride owns a tattoo shop in LA, it felt very ‘them’. Hunter’s attempt at tattooing an “H” on Adeline’s ring finger was, by her own admission, horrible. Her “A” was obviously perfect! The exchange took around ten minutes, involved plenty of heckling from their guests and left them with a pair of initials that they’ll wear forever. .

The couple had attended nine weddings during the previous year and knew the standard format wasn’t for them. They kept the parts they cared about and binned the rest. “We figured our wedding is about us, so there was no need to adhere to tradition and decided to make it truly our own”, the bride said. “I’m a tattoo artist and my husband works in the art department in film/TV, so we included elements in our day that reflected both of those parts of our relationship.”

Hunter’s dad officiated the ceremony in Big Sur where the couple wrote their own vows, while his dad prepared a section about their relationship and the eight years he had watched them grow together. Adeline’s mum walked her down the dirt hiking trail that served as an aisle. An old friend filmed and edited the elopement weekend, and the finished film played on a loop throughout the party.

Adeline wore a Jenny Yoo gown with vintage shoes and accessories, while Hunter wore a vintage suit. Even their rings were vintage.

The venue took the largest share of the $15k budget. Much of what went inside it came from Facebook Marketplace. When furniture hire quotes started adding up, the couple rented a storage unit and began buying their own mid-century pieces instead. They collected sofas, coffee tables and chairs, alongside furniture borrowed from their home. Once the party was over, they sold everything and came close to breaking even!

The DIY list extended to the flash sheet Adeline designed and had turned into temporary tattoos. She also made the drinks menus, signs and crepe paper flowers for the bathrooms, then worked with her friend Zilah from Plants and Spaces until 1am the night before the wedding to assemble the floral arrangements. Photos from the couple’s relationship were framed for the tables and bar. Adeline hand-painted their surname onto a vintage placemat to create a banner for the guest table, while her father-in-law printed the custom matchbooks she had designed.

Hunter built 17 high-top tables, installed the overhead lighting and made a wooden sign displaying the dinner group numbers. The scale of the operation temporarily swallowed their home with boxes of decorations, table settings, craft supplies and grazing-board dishes.

The party began with Adeline and Hunter travelling up in the venue’s freight elevator. They lifted the door to find the room full of people cheering.

Dinner came with an open seating policy, allowing guests to choose where they sat and move around throughout the evening. There was no cake cutting because Adeline hates cake and no speeches because the couple knew their friends would exploit the open bar first!

That open bar did its job. Towards the end of the night, Hunter and his groomsmen ended up shirtless on the dance floor, drunkenly belting out Piano Man. A few days later, somebody sent the couple 30 separate videos of their friends doing the limbo with a microphone stand, an activity neither of them had realised was happening at the time.

Despite the workload, the couple would do their wedding the exact same way again. Making everything gave them control over how the space looked and where their money went. The result also felt connected to their work, their relationship and the way they wanted to spend the night.

“There shouldn’t be any rules to begin with”, Adeline concluded, “every couple is unique in their own way, and I feel like weddings should reflect that.”