Anya & VakhoJuly 2025

The whole day happened at one venue — from the morning preparations to the night. That decision takes the most tiring part out of a wedding: no drives between ceremony and dinner, no herding guests onto a coach, nobody sitting in a car through the best light.

The colour was single too. A crumpled silk white dress, a white suit, a white aisle runner, linen cloths, white candles — everything else left to the green of the grass and the black window frames. The groom’s morning passes in a bright room with sheer curtains: hills and roofs outside, a green sofa, a white suit and brown loafers inside.

The ceremony was built outside, by a wall of tall black windows. Instead of an arch, a panel painted with a mountain and lotuses: pink outlines and thin strokes of grass. At its edges two columns of long grass, white poppies, narcissi and stock, with the occasional blue candle of delphinium; the painted grass tangles with the living stems. The white runner lies straight over the tiles.

The sun is hard at that hour, and the guests were prepared for it: dark glasses, lace fans, lawn behind their backs. The bride has a smooth bun and long tasselled earrings, the groom the same loafers as in the morning. After the words he lifts her so that the train stays behind on the runner.

Dinner is inside, in a hall with a glass roof: moulded panels along the walls, black-and-white tiles set on the diagonal, trees in planters and one enormous crystal chandelier over the centre. There is one table, set as a rectangle. No arrangements on it at all: down the middle runs a strip of living grass with white flowers, white pebbles poured along it, narcissi standing one by one in small ceramic dishes. At each setting a menu on torn-edged paper and a name card tied with a blade of grass.

The food is Georgian: cheeses, pkhali, chashushuli, trout, Imeretian khachapuri and khabidzgini, with qvevri wine and saperavi. At the bottom of the menu one line tells you in advance what the evening will be: chacha is served after ten. By night the overhead light was taken down to candles — white, shaped like the pebbles, so the flames seem to come straight out of the stones on the cloth.