Sahel has spent her career building other people’s weddings, from Lake Como to French chateaux to private estates in New England, always as the person behind the scenes. Three years after her own wedding, we sat down with her for a rollback to those three days in the hills outside Florence. She and Mark married across a full buyout of a Renaissance villa, with a Persian ceremony rebuilt for a Tuscan setting, secret vows written for his four children, and a wine cellar that turned into a nightclub well past midnight.
As the founder of Sahel Rothera Events, she took the entire design into her own hands nine months out, which makes this a rare kind of feature: a wedding told from both sides of the planner’s table, by the woman who is usually holding the timeline. “After spending so many years creating weddings for other couples, I honestly thought I knew what it would feel like to be a bride. I quickly realized I didn’t,” says Sahel.
Location: Tuscany, Italy
Style: Classic, Black Tie, Multicultural
Time of planning: 2 years
Number of guests: 90
Setting: Historic Villa
Season: Summer
Sahel and Mark met at 35,000 feet. She first noticed him in the British Airways lounge while she was pouring a glass of champagne, though the two never spoke there. The encounter only became a conversation once she boarded and realized they had been seated next to each other for the next eight hours. Two months later they went on their first date, and that settled it.
Mark proposed over Thanksgiving in Dubai, surrounded by family, in the city where Sahel had built the first chapter of her career and launched her first events agency years earlier. Choosing that place gave the moment a specific weight for her. Their relationship has been shaped by travel and coincidence from the very start, which felt fitting for something that began on a long flight home.
Rehearsal Dinner
Sahel approached the three days like a story told in chapters, and the first opened the evening before the wedding at Il Borgo Machiavelli. Guests walked through the Tuscan vineyards to reach a dinner set above the vines, drawn from the colors of Sicily and the Amalfi Coast: blue and white Italian ceramics, fresh lemons, candlelight, and soft white florals. Before dinner, everyone tasted wine at the Mangiacane vineyards, which gave family members meeting for the first time a reason to fall into conversation.
A four course Tuscan dinner followed under a live band, and by the end of the night people who had shaken hands an hour earlier were dancing beneath the stars. Sahel held that first evening to close family and the wedding party, and the intimacy of it set the tone for a weekend she had built to unfold slowly. She is candid about how much planning that slowness takes.
"The biggest misconception is that a multi day destination wedding is simply one wedding with a few extra events. In reality, it's several completely different celebrations happening over a number of days, each with its own logistics, timeline, atmosphere, and guest experience."
Welcome Party
The second day was designed entirely around the guests, most of whom had traveled a long way and needed permission to do nothing. Sahel turned the gardens of Villa Mangiacane into an Italian summer party, with lounge furniture, picnic blankets, and communal tables across the lawns, and handed out welcome gifts, straw hats, and flip flops so people would kick off their shoes and stay a while.
Croquet ran across the lawn as a nod to Mark’s English side, chefs worked live cooking stations, and food arrived as a wandering experience rather than a seated meal: fresh pasta, Italian specialities, and artisan gelato in eight flavors that the children and the adults competed over. A live band carried the early evening before a DJ turned it into a proper celebration by the pool. For Sahel, that unstructured day was the point, not an interlude between the real events. “We wanted our guests to experience Tuscany rather than simply visit it,” says the couple.
Bride's Morning & Fashion
Sahel built Sahel Rothera Events out of a career that ran through luxury hospitality, private aviation, and fashion. She launched her first events and modeling agency in Dubai in 2008, sold it, and moved to New York, where she worked as a corporate flight attendant and jet outfitter for royal families and ultra high net worth clients. Born in Iran, raised in Dubai, and based in New York, she came to multicultural celebrations naturally rather than as a specialty, and her own marriage to an Englishman gave her a personal stake in blending two heritages under one roof. Her studio ethos is short: luxury lives in the details.
The events side of that career reignited almost by accident. In 2018 an aviation client asked her to plan a surprise birthday aboard a private aircraft, and weeks later his wife asked her to plan a fiftieth birthday for a hundred and eighty guests at a Hamptons estate, on a month’s notice and with no vendor network in New York. She took it, and at the end of the night the client stood up and told the room that the woman they knew as their flight attendant was the person behind the whole celebration. She now accepts a deliberately small number of events each year, and eventually turned that same eye on her own wedding.
When it came to choosing her own dress, her professional eye cut both ways: easier because years in the industry had taught her exactly what she did not want, harder because there were far too many beautiful options to sort through. She landed on a gown from Tal Kedem Bridal‘s Premium collection, a figure hugging design with a sweetheart neckline and removable off the shoulder lace sleeves that let her reshape the look across the weekend, plus a detachable train that gave her a dramatic entrance before coming off for the evening. It was never about a trend, only about something that felt like her across three very different celebrations.
On her feet she wore Roger Vivier heels through the ceremony, then changed into white sneakers from Farfetch redesigned in a bridal style for the after party. Her Cartier jewelry ran through the whole day, from her ring to her earrings to a necklace she held back for her grand entrance. She finished with Burberry Classic, a scent she had worn for years, soft makeup that kept the focus off any single feature, a sleek twisted bun that let the gown lead, and a deliberately small bouquet.
Groom’s Fashion
Mark’s look leaned classic and stayed there. For the ceremony he wore a custom tuxedo by Alan David, the fifth generation New York bespoke house, cut specifically for him, then changed into a Canali tuxedo for the grand entrance and the evening. His shoes were Christian Louboutin, and he kept the rest simple: a Cartier ring, a gold bracelet, and an understated boutonniere.
Sahel styled him herself, and by her own telling he did not have much say in the matter. On the wedding video he can be heard admitting he had butterflies all day and that the day had finally arrived. They chose to skip a first look so that Mark would see her only as she came down the aisle, which made the moment land harder for both of them.
Planning Her Own Wedding
The hardest brief Sahel had ever taken on turned out to be her own. Nine months before the date, she let go of the planner she had been collaborating with in Dubai, a decision driven by the time difference and her own schedule, and took the design over herself. The biggest surprise was how much shifted the moment the location did: as soon as she and Mark found the villa, the whole plan reorganized around it and stretched from two days into three.
Designing for herself proved harder than designing for any client, because she was both the person making the decisions and the person those decisions were for, carrying years of stored up ideas with no easy way to edit them down. Bride says: “If nobody else were looking, would we still love this? If the answer was yes, it stayed. If it was there simply because it looked impressive or felt expected, it didn’t make the cut“.
"As someone who spends her career creating weddings for others, I knew how quickly the day would pass. Rather than focusing on perfection, I focused on being fully present with my husband, family, and friends."
Ceremony
Sahel and Mark chose Villa Mangiacane on their second day of scouting, before they had even seen the five other properties on their list. The cypress lined drive, the art collection inside, and the view of the Florence Duomo from the terrace settled it on the spot. They secured a full buyout of the estate for three days, all twenty eight rooms, with sixty of the ninety guests staying on the property, so the weekend became a place people lived in.
For the ceremony, Sahel honored her Persian heritage through a Sofreh Aghd, the traditional wedding spread, reimagined by raising it onto white pedestals. A recitation of Rumi carried through the service, and every guest received a printed guide to the Sofreh Aghd so a mostly non Persian room could follow the symbolism: the mirror for light and clarity, the candles for warmth, the honey for the sweetness of the union, the herbs and spices to turn away the evil eye, the sugar cones that married female relatives grind over the couple’s heads. She built her culture in as something guests could read rather than simply watch.
The most talked about moment was not on anyone’s timeline. After exchanging vows with Mark, Sahel paused, said her promises were not finished, and turned to his four children to read a second set of vows she had written for them alone.
“David, Christopher, Nicolas and Juliette, I want you to know that I dearly love your father. We have become very good friends over the years and we have learned to love each other. As you have so graciously shared this wonderful man with me, so will I share the love I feel for him with all of you. Together, we will learn much more about each other. I promise also to be fair and to be honest, to be available for you as I am for your dad, and in due time, to earn your love, respect and true friendship. I will not attempt to replace anyone, but to make a place in your hearts that is for me alone. On this day when I marry your dad, I promise to love and support you as my own.”
The room did not stay dry eyed, and those vows became one of the moments guests kept returning to across the rest of the weekend.
"Our wedding never felt like a Persian wedding in Italy or an English wedding with Persian traditions. It simply felt like our wedding."
Moments Together
After the ceremony, the couple moved to cocktails on the terrace and spent the gap before dinner among their guests rather than tucked away for portraits. Sahel and Mark had decided early that they would reach every single person over the weekend, thank each of them for the journey, and take a photograph with all of them
"The truth is, your guests won't remember whether every flower was in the right place or whether the timeline ran perfectly. They will remember how the day felt."
Reception
The reception unfolded in the Italian Gardens at Villa Mangiacane under an all white floral palette of baby’s breath, several kinds of white roses, and delicate white perennials chosen to work with the villa’s architecture. A saffron Aperol spritz served as the signature drink, a live band of five musicians and a singer played through the early evening, and the couple took their first dance to At Last. Dinner ran to five courses paired with Brunello di Montalcino, Chianti Classico, and Super Tuscan wines, threaded with speeches, a four tier vanilla cake, and fireworks.
One of the night’s most Persian moments was the Knife Dance, or Raghs e Chaghoo, in which family members playfully steal the cake knife and refuse to hand it over until the groom negotiates. Sahel’s sister and niece performed it, each collecting between five hundred and seven hundred dollars before surrendering the knife, and for the non Iranian guests it became one of the most entertaining stretches of the evening.
Beneath the villa sits a historic wine cellar, and Sahel had it transformed into an underground nightclub, where the DJ was joined by a live violinist and a saxophonist. A pizza station opened around eleven to a queue that formed almost immediately despite the five course dinner, a cigar and cognac lounge gave guests somewhere to step out of the music, and the dancing ran until four in the morning. By the last night, ninety guests who had arrived from different countries and cultures were behaving like one family, and that, more than the design or the food or the fireworks, is what Sahel names as the thing she carries with her.
"Without question, the most memorable moment was looking around and seeing two families become one."
Sahel’s parting advice comes from both roles she played that weekend, the planner and the bride. As a planner she says: “I encourage couples to think about the rhythm of the weekend. Every event should have its own personality. You don’t want three evenings that all feel the same. Build the energy gradually, allow guests time to relax, and create moments where they can genuinely connect with one another. Those shared experiences often become the memories people talk about long after the wedding is over.”
And as a bride she adds: “Make time to look around. Pause during the ceremony and take in the faces of the people who came to celebrate with you. Sit beside your partner for a few quiet moments during dinner. Dance more than you planned to. Hug your family a little longer. Those are the moments that stay with you.“
Advice from the couple:
• A destination wedding is about much more than one beautiful day. It’s about creating an experience that people will remember every time they think about that place, those people, and the time they shared together.
PLANNER & CONCEPT DESIGN Sahel Rothera Events | CAPRI PHOTOGRAPHER Chiaia Wedding Studio | VENUE Villa Mangiacane | FLORIST I Fiori Di Nadia | MAKEUP & HAIR Beauty Livery | WEDDING DRESS Talkedem Premium | AFTER PARTY DRESS Tal Kedem Bridal | RENTAL Preludio Divisione Noleggio | AUDIO & VISUAL Imagine Events | CELEBRANTS Tuscan Pledges | CAKE Sugarcups Cake Design | GELATO Geliterra Nro | CATERING Il Borgo Machiavelli | ENTERTAINMENT, DAY 1 Diletta Landi | ENTERTAINMENT, DAY 2 Deb Jones Live Music | ENTERTAINMENT, DAY 3 Elan Artists | DJ Dj Amir Ghavami
