This “Festive Flashy Formal” Wedding Took Place in Beverly Hills’s Secret Jungle
“Blake and I met in the most Hollywood way possible,” Daria Radlinski (now Greenbaum) says. “At a movie premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theatre.” Daria’s good friend Rachael Henochsberg worked on producing the film We Are Your Friends, while Blake’s friend Max Joseph directed it. Daria—a former New York–based stylist turned real-estate agent in L.A.—hadn’t been in the mood to go to the after-party, and once she got there, she lost track of Henochsberg and her other friends. “Blake came up to me and introduced himself. A little voice inside my head said, ‘Just go with this,’” she remembers of how she met the writer and producer. They spent more than an hour talking about everything from travel to Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and the next day he texted to ask her out. Their first date was at Soho House in West Hollywood. “By the end of the night, I was so smitten that I suggested we take a picture in the photo booth,” Daria recalls. “While we were taking photos, he went in to kiss me, so we actually have a photo of our first kiss!”
They had been seeing each other for two years when they took a last-minute road trip to visit some friends in Carmel-by-the-Sea. “On the day we were leaving to drive home, Blake went to the Monterey airport instead. He tricked me into believing it had a great restaurant where you could watch the planes come in—a local secret, he told me. I thought nothing of it and was just impressed that he made brunch reservations!” Daria admits. Once they arrived, he surprised her and said that they were taking a tour of the coast by helicopter. Twenty minutes in, they landed in a field, and the pilot announced: “Here we are: Post Ranch Inn.” “The Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur is a special place for us, as it’s where we spent our first anniversary,” Daria explains. “I was completely overwhelmed and had no idea what to expect.” Blake grabbed two glasses of Champagne at the restaurant and quickly suggested they take a walk in the redwoods while the servers got their table ready.
“I was wearing sandals and had no interest in following him through the forest, but he seemed excited, so who was I to protest?” Daria jokes. “We finally made our way to this beautiful golden meadow. He dropped to one knee and removed a tiny Judith Leiber pillbox from his pocket. Inside was the most beautiful ring I had ever seen.” She immediately said yes and started to cry. “Blake designed the ring himself, and the pillbox was the same one that his father used to propose to his mother,“ says Daria. “After I said yes, he then told me that we would be spending the weekend at the Post Ranch Inn. He had packed a bag for me and put it in the helicopter without my knowing! I still get emotional when I think about his proposal—it really shows what a thoughtful, romantic person he is and makes me feel incredibly lucky.”
The two then set out to plan a quintessential L.A. wedding. “In terms of conceptualizing the events, locations, and design, Blake and I planned those elements ourselves—we love doing creative projects together,” notes Daria. “After two years of feeling too busy, we decided to pull the trigger and get married in just two and a half months!” A colleague of Daria’s directed her toward Hovik Harutyunyan of Harutyunyan Events. “They went above and beyond to make our vision come alive,” Daria says. “Hovik pulled the night off without a hitch, and his attention to detail and calm energy were just what we needed when planning on such a short timeline!”
With many guests coming from out of town, Daria and Blake wanted to give them an experience that felt unique to L.A., so they came up with the concept of their wedding celebration as a “dream night out in L.A.”—one that felt fun and glamorous and showed the city through their eyes. “John Lautner is one of our favorite architects, and the Sheats-Goldstein residence was one of the first places we thought of,” Daria says. “Through my real-estate contacts, I was able to get in touch with the home’s owner, James Goldstein, and his longtime assistant, Roberta, whom we hit it off with immediately. Luckily James understood the vision we had for the ceremony and was kind enough to let us take over his home for this special occasion. It just so happens that they’d never hosted a wedding there, so we were their first!”
The home sits on more than five acres of lush tropical gardens, known as the only jungle in Beverly Hills, and this influenced the floral theme. “We didn’t want to cut off the view with florals, so our very close friends and florists, Ezra Woods and Michael Woodcock of Pretend Plants and Flowers, suggested having flowers floating in the pool that echoed the colors of the sunset, which we loved,” Daria says. There is a lot of visual interest at the Sheats-Goldstein residence, so they didn’t want to do too much with the decor. Instead, they brought in elements that stylistically mirrored the architectural themes found in the home.
The former stylist in Daria really came out when visualizing her bridal look and how it would complement the setting. “I knew that it had to be something sleek and unfussy, and my two-and-a-half-month lead time meant that many custom options were out of the question,” she explains. “I was browsing online one night and fell in love with this Toni Maticevski dress, but it wasn’t sold in white anywhere in the U.S. I reached out to Loho Bridal in L.A., which was able to get me the dress in white directly from the designer in Australia. I adored the lyrical draping and the way it contrasted the very angular features of the Sheats-Goldstein residence.”
