How Celebrity Wedding Planner Bryan Rafanelli Designed His Own Wedding in Less Than 30 Days
With their 30th anniversary looming, celebrity event planner Bryan Rafanelli and his longtime partner, Mark Walsh, decided to make things official. “Mark proposed in early July of 2019, and his raw emotional desire to get married convinced me it was the most important thing in the world to him,” Bryan says. The proposal didn’t come without strings, though. “One of Mark’s conditions was that we had to get married before the end of the year.” The turnaround was quick, even for a seasoned event planner who counts the Clintons as frequent clients. But their desire to move quickly was compounded by the fact that Bryan’s book, A Great Party: Designing the Perfect Celebration, was being released at the end of September, and some of the couple’s dear friends were dealing with critical health challenges. “Suddenly, getting married within 30 days just felt like an important thing to do,” Bryan says. “My mother, who is 84 years old, reminded me she could not wait forever!”
Bryan and Mark, a fundraising consultant, decided to have their wedding at the summer house where Bryan produced his first wedding, 23 years prior. “The owners have become family,” Bryan says. “They have been long-term clients and business advisers for more than 25 years, and when I told them we had decided to get married, they enthusiastically offered their beautiful summer home in a community called Oyster Harbor on an island in Cape Cod Bay.”
Bryan grew up in New England, and he had always spoken enthusiastically to his clients about September being the perfect time to get married on Cape Cod. “As the summer comes to an end, there is a vintage quality to the flowers and foliage on the Cape that I truly love,” he says. “I’d always admired my parents’ wedding. They had a morning service followed by lunch at my father’s mother’s home. Given the fact that we wanted to plan this in 30 days, I had no desire to host a big wedding or have an evening reception, but loved the idea of a day ceremony and lunch, just like my parents had.”
So a simple, understated morning ceremony followed by a beautiful lunch with family and friends is exactly what Bryan set out to do in this very limited amount of time. “I wanted everything to feel effortless and easy,” he explains. “Elegant, understated, summer. I wanted guests to feel like family, and for the reception to be a reflection of our simple intention to ‘finally’ get married.”
Originally the wedding was scheduled for Saturday, September 7, but Hurricane Dorian had other plans, and the event had to shift a day as a result. “I have a talented group of amazing planners and designers at my company, Rafanelli Events, and they handled all the logistics,” Bryan says. “I secretly asked two of my planners to help navigate the planning, but I insisted on doing the actual designing of the wedding myself and not asking my creative team for help.”
Bryan was similarly exacting when it came to his wardrobe. He knew he wanted to wear a simple summer suit but didn’t want to don linen post–Labor Day. “We originally thought we were going to wear our favorite suits hanging in our closet, but then Mark sent me a picture of a suit he wanted to buy,” Bryan explains. “We ended up meeting with a personal shopper friend of ours, and to our surprise, we each chose the exact same Prada suit to wear even though we were at different appointments. In keeping with my personal independent style, I wanted to wear a blue Brioni dress shirt and tie, and Mark wanted to wear a crisp white Eton shirt.” George Clooney, the couple’s 8-month-old golden retriever, dressed up for the day in a floral collar made with a steel gray grosgrain ribbon adorned with hellebores, piers, roses, hydrangea, and Italian pittosporum.
At the start of the ceremony, guests took their seats on a hand-lain stone terrace overlooking sailboats in the harbor. The first two rows were reserved for the couple’s nieces and nephews and their significant others. “We seated them in the front row because we asked them all to stand up for us during part of the ceremony,” Bryan explains. The officiant was Bryan’s first father of the bride from 23 years earlier, and as he spoke the couple stood in front of a decorative structure that was inspired by a window in the circa-1868 stone church that is near where the couple calls home in New York City. Wood-etched leaves bearing the names of parents, family, and friends who had passed were tied to the structure; they blew in the wind coming off the harbor while “Auld Lang Syne” was performed. The couple read their vows and exchanged gold Hermés wedding bands. (Bryan’s was engraved with the words My Everything, while Mark’s had the message The One on the inside—a reference to the message Bryan wrote to Mark in the acknowledgment page of his first book: “The One—the person who always keeps me honest and lifts me up . . . and pulls me down when needed.”) To close out the ceremony, Bryan and Mark surprised the attendees when live musicians—who had been sitting among the guests—stood up and played CeCe Peniston’s ”Finally” to lots of laughter and applause, in a very Love Actually moment.
