Jazmine & Marcus

Astra, Falls Creek, Victoria

captured by Wild Romantic Photography

Jazmine and Marcus met during their university years while attending an annual Ski Squad trip to Mt Hotham. “Marcus was a much better skier and impressed me with his skiing ability and dance moves at the pub that night! We ended up sitting next to each other on the 5-hour bus ride home to Melbourne, talking and also playing footsies! Soon after we went on our first date. Now we visit the snow each year on our anniversary.”

Marcus proposed on their 7th anniversary on one of their annual ski trips. A chairlift ride to the Summit of Mt Buller Marcus got down on one knee (still wearing his ski goggles) he asked Jazmine to marry him. The ring a beautiful vintage-inspired sapphire that he had custom designed. “The blue sapphire colour reminds me of the snow and our love story. I was very happy about the proposal, but also wanted to hurry down from the summit edge,” recalls Jazmine.

We planned the wedding ourselves over the period of 18 months. We decided after a long decision making process, that we would love to be married in the snow and continue on our story. Our parents were a litle shocked that they would have to be wearing coats and jackets on our big day!

In between the planning, I actually went travelling around the world solo for 8 months!, so some was done remotely and the rest of the planning when I came back to Melbourne. Marcus and I wanted our wedding to be an amazing experience for our guests and have them enjoy what we love about the snow. We focused many hours of our planning on the detailed itinerary of the four day event and making our guests comfortable in every aspect from the travel, to the accommodation and the weekend departure. We also wanted our wedding to be very personal to us. Being a designer myself, I had a hard time passing over the creative elements, so I created all of our signage, stationery and décor items to fit with our snow-romantic love story!

Winter Princess

The gown was found in New York while travelling. I made an appointment at Kleinfeld (say yes to the dress!) and fell in love with a Dennis Basso Ball gown. The gown had illusion front, back and sleeves, dripping with crystals and beading. The dress then flowed down elegantly with layers of tulle and an oyster coloured silk underlayer. The dress took 8 months to make, after travelling the world, I made a detour to pick it up from Kleinfeld because it was more affordable and safer than sending it home by mail. The gown travelled with me on the subway to Brooklyn and onto the plane in the biggest suitcase I could find.

My wedding shoes (white luxe snow boots!) were found in Austria, also on my travels, and the second pair of shoes (white glittery sneakers) were bought at Kate Spade on 5th Avenue in New York. 

BRIDESMAIDS

The bridesmaids wore soft grey floor length dresses with beaded fronts to match my dress. They also had grey faux fur jackets worn outside and their own snow boots! We picked the dresses while all together on a bride tribe shopping day in Melbourne.

We both agree that the whole destination weekend was perfect and we had excatly what we wanted, which was a great weekend in the snow with close intimate family and friends, experiencing our favourite things.

SNOWY LOCATION

Falls Creek as a location was very close to where we met and had the best facilites for events out of all the Alpine resorts. We wanted to have a very unique wedding in a venue where there had been few weddings before. We also wanted a luxury destination, so we chose the 5-star European style ski lodge, Astra at Falls Creek and booked it exclusively for 2 nights. It was perfect having all of our guests in the same place mingling and relaxing for the weekend. Noone had to worry about travelling to and from different venues after they had arrived on the mountain. The chefs and staff at the Astra are also award-winning hosts and we couldn’t have been happier with their generous service. 

FLORAL DELIGHTS

Due to the winter season and the difficulty of the location, we opted for artificial florals. We brought up from Melbourne, two large floral chandeliers made by Melbourne Event Florals, to add a romantic feel inside the ski lodge. We placed one chandelier over the ceremony and dance floor area and another over the dining tables. The team at Hand Crafted Florals in Caulfield made the beautiful silk hydrangea bouquet and buttoniares, which I still have to this day! For the centrepieces we used a mixture of foraged and faux gum leaves as a garland.

Inside our ‘Order of Ceremony’ booklet, we described a little bit about each bridal party member and also a little story about each item that I was wearing for “old, new, borrowed, blue”. One of those borrowed items was Marcus’s great grand mother’s pearl bracelet. I thought this was a nice idea to show that we appreciated the gesture, otherwise the guests would have never known about these details.