Emily Sundberg’s Wedding on a New York City Rooftop Felt Like “Heaven in the Clouds”
Emily Sundberg, the writer behind the gossipy daily business and culture Substack Feed Me, matched with Jake Cohen, the head of finance at a tech company, on Hinge in 2022. At the time, she was in the middle of finishing up a documentary she was directing called The End, about an island in the Hamptons. “Jake capitalized on that and was making a lot of clever movie references in our conversation,” Emily remembers. “Our first date was the next night, and our second one was the next night. We’d lived in the same neighborhood and never crossed paths, so it was a lot of fun spending the early months of our relationship in Brooklyn together.”
The couple got engaged the day before Thanksgiving in 2024, while on a walk in their neighborhood of Park Slope. “We have a weekly routine of picking up Jake’s dry cleaning and getting pastries at Southside together,” Emily explains. “But Jake changed up the routine on this day and proposed right on our block.”
He sourced the stone with a friend whose family has a diamond business in New York, and the ring was made by a jewelry designer in London named Delaval Knight, who specializes in Art Deco designs. “My ring is the most meaningful object I own,” Emily shares. Thanksgiving was the next day, and the newly engaged couple spent it celebrating with both of their families. “It was so special—and by dessert, everyone started asking us about wedding plans,” Emily jokes. “We’d been engaged for [just] 24 hours!”
The wedding planning process was a whirlwind. “We started planning in January, and our wedding was in April,” Emily says. “My family lives on Long Island, and Jake’s family lives in Connecticut, so we wanted to do it somewhere close to the city, if not in the city.”
When it came time to select a venue, images of greenery or gardens were top of mind for both the bride and groom. “If not in a garden, somewhere outside,” Emily specifies. They explored several courtyards, secret gardens, beaches, and farms close to the city, but through a series of unexpected circumstances, the roof of Nine Orchard, a hotel housed in a historic Lower East Side landmark building, revealed itself.
“I believe that the stress of planning a wedding takes up the amount of time you give it, so I was glad we decided on a faster timeline,” Emily says. “Jake and I are both work demanding jobs, and it was hard to balance an expedited planning process with long work hours, but our planner Stacy Snyder from Breadseed Studio made it possible. We really wanted to work with a planner who prioritized the culinary and wine aspects of a wedding, and would be able to help us coordinate working with some of our friends for the party. I’m not type A, I owe a lot of our wedding day to her.”
The couple got married on April 19, and the night before the wedding, they welcomed their friends and family to a cocktail party at Gage Tollner, in the Brooklyn neighborhood where they first met. The bride wore a made-to-order powder-pink set from Super Yaya. “I knew I wanted to wear something jubilant that I could move around in,” she explains. “The set was celebratory: I felt like a glamorous macaron. And it was fun to be a pink bride for a few hours, before a full day of wearing white. I worked with their Lebanon-based team on the measurements and fitting—the brand required 25 different measurements from me, which I asked Jake to help me with while he was walking out the door to work one morning. He’s an angel. I wore diamond earrings that he got me for Valentine’s Day last year, and Jenna Perry’s blowout god Rodrigo Padilla did my hair. I [also] wore cream-colored Loeffler Randall heels, which lasted me from 5 p.m. to midnight and were remarkably comfortable.”
At the pre-wedding party, there were tropical drinks, some of the couple’s friends gave speeches, and the bride’s mom made peanut butter cookies for everyone to eat on their subway ride home. Most of the group made a second stop at Montero for a nightcap, but the bride and groom were sent to bed. “We heard the cookies helped the hangovers a little bit,” Emily jokes.
In the lead up to the wedding day itself, Emily realized that she d never imagined herself as a bride before trying on her wedding dress. “I didn’t have a Pinterest board I wanted to replicate, or a saved folder of dresses,” she says. “But while scanning LA-based Tab Vintage one night, I saw a vintage Vera Wang gown. I was drawn to the texture which reminded me of the gills underneath a mushroom. It was the fourth dress I tried on, and if it didn’t work out, I would’ve been in trouble because Tab doesn’t take returns. I ordered it somewhat impulsively and it was a bit small, but when I unzipped it from the garment bag in front of my tailor Esin, she gasped and said she had worked on the dress back in 2006 when she worked for Vera Wang.”
The bride’s veil was by Danielle Frankel. “I had my heart set on this grosgrain-trimmed tulle veil, but at the time I was putting my wedding wardrobe together—about four weeks before my wedding—it was sold out,” she says. “I wore a shorter veil, and ended up keeping it on the whole night, which I couldn’t have done with a longer veil. Everything happens for a reason!” About a week before the wedding, Emily bought her after-party dress at Doen on a rainy day in the West Village, while her wedding shoes were from Macy’s in Herald Square.
The bride’s favorite jeweler in New York, Laura Lombardi, made her wedding accessories—a custom wedding set of earrings and a necklace. “They were my favorite part of my wedding look, and when Laura first showed the pieces to me in her studio, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the brilliant people in this city who make it a more beautiful, stranger, more interesting place,” Emily says. “I have been a customer of hers for years, and wearing her pieces made me feel like myself.” The bride’s sister made her a blue anklet with glass beads and Jake’s initials on it that served as her “something blue.” Lila Childs did Emily’s makeup both nights, and Natalie Rotger and Rawan Rofaiel from Jenna Perry did her wedding updo.
On Saturday, the wedding ceremony was held at The Angel Orensanz Foundation on the Lower East Side. Her dad was the officiant. “Recounting his sermon—there’s no better word for it—makes me cry,” Emily says. “Through his research leading up to the wedding, he learned that Jake’s great grandfather and my great grandmother grew up on the same East Village street.” Then, during the ceremony, Emily’s friend Jane stood up to sing. “I didn’t go to Kenyon with her, but for the last ten years I’ve been hearing about her college performances,” Emily says. “This was even better.”
