The Bride Wore Elie Saab and a Diamond Tiara for Her Classic English Wedding at Drayton House
Anna Pops and Luke Stopford Sackville first met through a mutual friend on Mustique’s Macaroni Beach. Looking back on it today, the bride says the encounter feels fated. “Mustique holds a very special place in my heart,” Anna shares. “My family has been going since I was a very little girl, making it feel like home. I smile to think that I met the love of my life on the same beach where I grew up building myself mermaid tails in the sand.”
But in the moment, it ended up being exactly that: a moment. Luke, a financier, lived in London and Anna, who works in marketing at Charlotte Tilbury, lived in New York. While their chemistry was immediate, the reality of living on two separate continents was not. They left the island wanting to get to know each other better, but not quite sure how.
A few weeks later, however, Luke was in New York for business. He worked up the courage to ask her to dinner, but failed to make it clear that it was a date. So Anna asked if she could bring her close friend and her close friend’s husband. A confused Luke agreed—and then invited a friend of his own. “We had an amazing time—the five us,” she says, laughing.
When Luke learned Anna was visiting Italy with her family that summer, he knew this time he had to make his interest obvious. “Luke suggested that he come meet me and plan a special trip,” Anna says. “In hindsight, this was a crazy leap of faith, but I didn’t think twice about it.”
“I had never done anything like that before,” she adds.
Luke proposed to Anna twice. The official proposal was in the summer of 2023, at his grandparents’ house in Mallorca as the sun set. But the real proposal came weeks earlier. Luke had asked Anna’s father and mother for her hand in marriage. They gave their blessing. Hit with a simultaneous case of nerves and impatience, Luke decided he couldn t wait. So the next morning, Luke asked Anna to go for a walk. On a bench in Central Park, he asked her to marry him with a Haribo gummy ring.
The two always knew they’d marry at Drayton House, the Stopford Sackville’s family home for more than 700 years. (Despite its relative seclusion, the Northamptonshire estate has been in the spotlight lately as the house in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn.) “We feel so fortunate to be married in a place with such historical family importance and excited to be a part of Drayton’s ongoing story,” says Anna. They set a date for June 22, 2024, and joined forces with event planners Fait Accompli to help execute their vision.
Anna and Luke’s wedding weekend began on a Friday with a Midsummer Night’s Dream–theme party. Guests wandered around the gardens of Drayton in their best “enchanted” dress, stumbling upon everything from secret bars serving “love potions” (French 75 with muddled berries) out of vintage teacups, to a tree corridor lined with moss lanterns. Anna wore a Zuhair Murad ribbon dress, which she accented with a satin love knot wristlet by Anya Hindmarch. Her hair was woven with fresh flowers.
As the sun set, the bride gave a speech to the crowd. “Anna does everything with such elegance and style but she has a particular way with words that elide her innate joy and so it was such a happy moment, amongst many others, to hear her speak on Friday night talking about our life together and our future,” Luke says. When it was finally time to leave Drayton, guests were handed a book of love poems bound in their custom wedding toile. “We began our relationship long distance, and handwritten letters and little notes have always been a part of our love story,” says Anna. (The wedding toile, designed by Lotty Bunbury, served as a decorative accent for much of their weekend—covering everything from their invitations to the bridal party’s silk pajamas. The motif included Drayton House, Mustique palm trees, and the Central Park bench where they got engaged.)
.jpg)