A Color Coded San Miguel de Allende Wedding With Three Nights of Palettes

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Lauren and Matthew took over Rosewood San Miguel de Allende for three nights and gave each night its own color, its own corner of the property and its own music. Orange carried Friday, green and white carried Saturday, and reds, burgundies and pinks carried the Sunday wedding, all of it drawn from the tones of San Miguel itself. The 100 guests stayed on the same property, and the couple walked every route between events during planning to check where the light would fall at each hour. Lupita Tirado, planner & producer, translated those ideas into renderings and built the weekend around them.

Location: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Style: Dramatic, Architectural, Saturated
Time of planning: 1 year
Number of guests: 100
Setting: Luxury Hacienda
Season: Spring

Lauren and Matthew matched on Lox Club in early 2021, and Lauren left Matthew’s first messages unanswered. Matthew took the problem to the app’s signature Yenta feature, which sent Lauren a message encouraging her to reply, and she wrote back right away. Dates in Miami followed once they met, and a second round of dates in New York came the very next week.

The proposal happened on a beach in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, the day before New Year’s Eve in 2023, in sunset light. It ran well past 30 minutes because the two of them stayed on the sand to talk about the life they were about to start, to make promises to each other and to say out loud what marriage means to them.

Welcome Cocktail

The weekend started with Mexico long before it had a venue. Lauren and Matthew had traveled the country together, from Mexico City and Tulum to Careyes, Todos Santos and La Ventana, and they wanted a wedding built on the art, the architecture, the furniture and the craftsmanship they kept returning for. Rosewood San Miguel let them keep every guest on one property and give each event a space it never repeated, and on each return trip to San Miguel they walked the guest routes themselves, checking where the sun would sit and what view would open at each corner.

Friday opened in the amphitheater with an orange palette and a Mexican meets Moroccan warmth. A hanging fixture of red fringe wrapped around lanterns delivers the Moroccan half of that brief, and candle lit stone staircases deliver the Mexican colonial half.

Guests wrote notes and wishes for the couple on a Tree of Life, a motif that also runs through Mexican folk ceramics, and the same piece came back inside the reception tent on Sunday. Severo Barrera played live, Iván Maraña handled entertainment and Ophelia supplied the flowers.

Groom’s Fashion

Saturday started on the Luna rooftop, where guests watched the sunset together before moving into the Lavender Garden for dinner. The palette switched to green and white to mirror the surrounding landscape and Matthew’s green suit.

The green turns up on objects as well as plants: fluted glassware and menu cards edged in white carry it across the table, and Matthew’s olive double breasted suit makes him part of the setting. A crystal chandelier hangs from a freestanding frame over the lawn tables, with a terracotta building and a line of cypress trees behind it. Sobrelamesa handled table styling, Cyre supplied the linens, Bloque por Bloque provided rentals, and Adrian Jusdanis played live.

Bride's Morning

Lauren got ready with her mother, her mother in law and her two sisters in law instead of a traditional bridal party. Her mother, Andrea Adelstein, a wedding planner in New York City, came to every appointment and shaped each fashion decision, and almost every piece was bought before its event had a place in the schedule.

Sunday started with a plan for head to toe lace and ended with a different dress. At Mark Ingram Atelier, where Lauren was shopping with her stylist McKenzie, her mother pulled a Stéphane Rolland gown from the Rendezvous La Mariée 2 collection, and Lauren went back to try it on many times before she committed. Rolland is a Paris couturier who works in volume and architectural cuts, and his showroom doubled as the atelier of Pierre Cadault in Emily in Paris. Here the volume sits at the hip, in a sculpted organza ruffle that stands away from a clean strapless column.

The floral veil from Mark Ingram Atelier covers the tulle in fabric flowers and delivers the softness the lace was supposed to bring. At six feet tall, Lauren wanted flat shoes, so she chose Danielle Frankel Beatrice ballet flats, painted by hand to suit the dress.

For the afterparty Lauren wanted something unexpected and ideally vintage, and she ordered everything from Chanel jumpsuits to Alaïa dresses before she found a Balmain Paris ready to wear two piece set from Spring 2016. She first worried it was too silly, then put it on and changed her mind. She traced the pants to Doutzen Kroes on that runway, the show where Olivier Rousteing cast his supermodel Balmain Army, and they are the only pants she has ever needed to have hemmed. Bottega Veneta heels finished the look.

Groom's Fashion

Matthew wore a custom suit on both Friday and Saturday. Friday’s came with Maison Margiela black sneakers, which gave the welcome night an off duty edge, and Saturday’s olive green suit matched the garden and came with Gucci loafers. On Sunday he wore a custom Zegna tuxedo with Tom Ford tuxedo shoes.

His watches carry the weekend’s best story. On Saturday he wore an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore, a model Emmanuel Gueit introduced in 1993 as a heavier, bolder rework of the Royal Oak that Genta drew in 1972, and Genta reportedly walked into the Audemars Piguet booth at Baselworld furious about it. Lauren wore Genta’s Nautilus on Friday, so both of them wore his work during the weekend, and Matthew wore the version its own designer disliked.

First Look

The first look came out, and photographer EFEGE caught it perfectly. Against that wall, the white column of the Rolland gown reads as one clean shape, and the organza ruffle at the hip breaks the line.

Ceremony

The ceremony was designed around the view. The Rosewood lawn looks toward the historic buildings and the skyline of San Miguel, and the couple refused to block it, so the chuppah is a clean white frame of pillars and soft draping instead of a backdrop.

Ochre curtains open onto the aisle the way a proscenium opens onto a set, with the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel filling the back of the frame. That pink neo Gothic facade was built between 1880 and 1890 by Zeferino Gutiérrez, a self taught stonemason who worked from postcards and engravings of European cathedrals and quarried pink cantera from the Palo Huérfano volcano.

In Jewish tradition the chuppah represents the home a couple builds, and it stays open on all four sides to signal a home that welcomes others. Lauren and Matthew took the idea further and seated guests in a circle around the chuppah, so everyone could see faces instead of the backs of rows. Deep red flowers at the base of the structure and along the aisle, where glass cylinders of candles line the path, bring the burgundies and pinks against all that white. Cocktails started at Pirules Bar before guests walked to the lawn.

The ceremony was timed to the light, from the walk down the aisle to the way the sun crossed the lawn and skyline on the move into the tent. Millennial Rabbi, a friend of the couple for years, officiated, and Lauren and Matthew read their own vows. Men from both families, Matthew’s best man and several of his groomsmen each led a prayer. The couple names the guiding principle of the day as intimacy within grandeur, with the chuppah at the center, the Parroquia framed by cypress trees on one side, the Super Tent on the other and a pink sunset behind it.

Reception

Guests nicknamed the reception tent the Super Tent, since it was the largest any of them had seen. Ivory drapery lifts toward the center of the ceiling, red light washes the folds, and guests arrive up a staircase lined with glass cylinders of candles, so the entrance repeats the ceremony aisle. The hand strung florals above the fountain and the hanging lights along the sides of the tent were the planner’s ideas, and the couple gave her full trust to execute them.

The tables sit in taupe linen with a burgundy taper and low red flowers, and a cascade of deep burgundy blooms is lit hard enough to throw a long shadow across the table, a setup straight from the Spanish bodegón tradition of still life. Rosewood made the cake, a tall white tower with halved figs worked through the tiers, which carries the red and pink palette in fruit instead of flowers. Guests found personalized journals in place of place cards, and the Tree of Life from Friday stood in the tent.

The couple wanted songs every guest could sing word for word, so the playlist leaned on big wedding classics. Music played live, and their close friend DJed the afterparty until the sun came up over San Miguel, with guests watching it from the roof of the hotel.

Lauren and Matthew’s advice comes in two parts. Be specific and ambitious about what the weekend should be, even when that means three nights of events, one hotel for every guest, cocktails before the ceremony and a ceremony that flows straight into dinner. Then give the people you hire room to improve the idea, since almost every vendor came through the planning team’s recommendations and some of the couple’s favorite details were things they would never have thought of alone.

Advice from the couple:

• Don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger than what might feel conventional. Not everything we did followed a traditional wedding format, and some of our favorite choices came from asking ourselves what we actually wanted the weekend to feel like rather than what we thought we were supposed to do.

• At the same time, once you have the dream, trust the professionals you have chosen to help bring it to life. The execution of our wedding—and almost all the vendors we worked with—came directly from Lupita and Joe’s recommendations. Their renderings, ideas, and ability to translate what was in our heads into something tangible were tremendous. Some of the details we loved most were things we never would have thought of on our own.

• I also leaned heavily on my mom, Andrea Adelstein, who is a wedding planner in New York City. She was a sounding board throughout the entire process and was especially influential when it came to every fashion choice I made and many of the very small details that can become overwhelming when you are planning something of this scale.