This California Vineyard Wedding Was Made Magical by a Few Hollywood Moments
Caroline Edwards and Nicholas Kraft first connected on the set of a short film she was producing at Emerson College back in 2011. “We met the first day on set,” Nicholas remembers. “She, the insanely accomplished and impressive junior, me the chubby-cheeked freshman boom operator––but I had actually first seen her a week earlier when she ran the crew production meeting in Walker Building room 202. I was enamored. She was beautiful. She was confident. She had this arresting charm. In hindsight, I fell in love the second I saw her, but in the moment, it manifested itself in extreme intimidation.” (Now, she is the head of the podcast department at ICM Partners, a talent and literary agency in Los Angeles, and he works with the writer and actor B.J. Novak, producing film and TV projects—most recently The Premise on Hulu.)
The two became fast friends, and Nicholas did his best to hide his feelings. “Never could I imagine that a woman like Caroline would entertain any romantic thoughts of me,” he says. “But after three years of trying to suppress being deeply in love with her, I burst.”
In his very own Say Anything moment, Nicholas showed up at Caroline’s parents’ home at 2:00 a.m. “He called me to come outside, and as I crossed the lawn to find him, he wrapped his arms around me, kissed me, and told me he was in love with me,” she remembers. “It only took him three years to tell me he loved me, and then another seven to ask me to marry him!” Caroline adds.
After that first kiss, Caroline flew back to London, where she was working for Discovery Channel, and Nicholas went back to Boston for his senior year. They weren’t dating—technically—but they were Skyping every day, and he spent most of his time in class writing her long emails. “My grades really reflect this budding romance,” he says. “I was finally so close to what I had wanted for so long, and an ocean seemed an easy enough obstacle to overcome. One evening via Skype I told her, ‘I am going to pine for you regardless of what we call us, and it feels silly to pine for this girl I’m in love with*—*I want to pine for my girlfriend.’ That convinced her.”
Seven years later, the couple stopped in Boston for a snowy weekend on their way to Montreal to celebrate New Years with friends. “December 27th was a perfect Boston winter day,” Caroline says. “Bright blue sky, snow covering the city, crisp air. It’s my favorite time of year in the city where we met…I should have seen it coming.”
Nicholas wanted Caroline to have the experience of telling people they were engaged and seeing their surprise and excitement. “I knew how important it was to her that our engagement just be about us—no photographer, no parents secretly waiting back at the hotel, no flash mobs—so no one knew,” he says. “I waited until Christmas Day, two days before I proposed, to ask her father for his blessing and for her mother’s blessing to use Caroline’s grandmother’s ring. As we walked hand-in-hand through the Boston Public Gardens, a few hundred feet from Walker Building 202, where I first saw her, I told her how much I loved her and how proud I was of her, and of the career she was building, and how when it took her away from Los Angeles, as it often did, I felt that it was silly to pine for my girlfriend, I wanted to pine for my wife.”
“It was quite the callback!” Caroline jokes.
After the proposal, the couple went into planning mode. Caroline’s parents love to host, and she knew that if she ever got married they would want the festivities to take place at their house. “Our relationship started with a kiss on the front lawn of my childhood home,” Caroline recalls. “So it seemed fitting that our marriage start with a kiss on the front lawn of my parents’ new home: a vineyard in Templeton, California.”
The aesthetic direction for the wedding began in an unlikely place: the bathrooms at the Sunset Tower Hotel. “There’s this fabulous wallpaper, designed by Donald Robertson, that’s a pattern of vignettes of quintessential Los Angeles living—we both adore it,” Nicholas says. “As soon as we got engaged, we reached out to Donald to commission a similar piece depicting scenes from our wedding weekend. It was a fun exercise, to describe in as much detail as possible an event that was 18 months in the future, but our description informed the piece, and the piece ended up informing the actual event. The flower garland that’s strung across the barn was a complete creation of Donald’s in his piece, but we fell in love with it and then asked our florist to replicate it in real life. The cake, too, was modeled after his depiction of our depiction.”
Flowers were chosen and arranged to look as though they’d been plucked right from the garden, using vases entirely from Caroline’s mother’s collection. Instead of an altar or a formal structure, the couple stood in front of vines, framed only by pampas grasses and flowers from the garden.
The bride’s wardrobe came together a little less organically. “I absolutely hated wedding dress shopping,” Caroline admits. “I don’t like shopping to start, and I have never had any interest in being a ‘pretty-pretty princess’ and—much to my horror—most shopkeepers did not understand my take on the bridal process. I was relieved to find a jumpsuit and cape I liked relatively quickly.” But then, six weeks before the wedding, it arrived, and it was the wrong size, the wrong fabric, and…completely see-through.
“While recounting this nightmare to my coworker—an agent who represents costume designers for film—he offered up an introduction to the designer Kym Barrett,” Caroline remembers. (Barrett’s credits span The Matrix to the Charlie’s Angels reboot and Shang Chi.) “She and I went to a vintage fabric store and had the most incredible time, discussing the movement and flow of different fabrics and bringing them outside to see how they responded to and played with sunlight. My good luck continued when we found a fabric that I had literally dreamt of, months earlier. I’ve never once dreamed of an outfit, much less a fabric, but it came to me in a day dream: large, patterned roses.”
The store did not seem to have enough of this fabric to make a dress, but Kym assured Caroline she’d make magic happen. Six days later—two weeks before the wedding—Kym’s seamstress presented Caroline with the perfect dress, without an inch of fabric to spare. “It was wild!” Caroline says.
