This California Vineyard Wedding Was Made Magical by a Few Hollywood Moments

Caroline Edwards and Nicholas Kraft first connected on the set of a short film she was producing at Emerson College back in 2011. “We met the first day on set,” Nicholas remembers. “She, the insanely accomplished and impressive junior, me the chubby-cheeked freshman boom operator––but I had actually first seen her a week earlier when she ran the crew production meeting in Walker Building room 202. I was enamored. She was beautiful. She was confident. She had this arresting charm. In hindsight, I fell in love the second I saw her, but in the moment, it manifested itself in extreme intimidation.” (Now, she is the head of the podcast department at ICM Partners, a talent and literary agency in Los Angeles, and he works with the writer and actor B.J. Novak, producing film and TV projects—most recently The Premise on Hulu.)

The two became fast friends, and Nicholas did his best to hide his feelings. “Never could I imagine that a woman like Caroline would entertain any romantic thoughts of me,” he says. “But after three years of trying to suppress being deeply in love with her, I burst.”

In his very own Say Anything moment, Nicholas showed up at Caroline’s parents’ home at 2:00 a.m. “He called me to come outside, and as I crossed the lawn to find him, he wrapped his arms around me, kissed me, and told me he was in love with me,” she remembers. “It only took him three years to tell me he loved me, and then another seven to ask me to marry him!” Caroline adds.

After that first kiss, Caroline flew back to London, where she was working for Discovery Channel, and Nicholas went back to Boston for his senior year. They weren’t dating—technically—but they were Skyping every day, and he spent most of his time in class writing her long emails. “My grades really reflect this budding romance,” he says. “I was finally so close to what I had wanted for so long, and an ocean seemed an easy enough obstacle to overcome. One evening via Skype I told her, ‘I am going to pine for you regardless of what we call us, and it feels silly to pine for this girl I’m in love with*—*I want to pine for my girlfriend.’ That convinced her.”

Seven years later, the couple stopped in Boston for a snowy weekend on their way to Montreal to celebrate New Years with friends. “December 27th was a perfect Boston winter day,” Caroline says. “Bright blue sky, snow covering the city, crisp air. It’s my favorite time of year in the city where we met…I should have seen it coming.”

Nicholas wanted Caroline to have the experience of telling people they were engaged and seeing their surprise and excitement. “I knew how important it was to her that our engagement just be about us—no photographer, no parents secretly waiting back at the hotel, no flash mobs—so no one knew,” he says. “I waited until Christmas Day, two days before I proposed, to ask her father for his blessing and for her mother’s blessing to use Caroline’s grandmother’s ring. As we walked hand-in-hand through the Boston Public Gardens, a few hundred feet from Walker Building 202, where I first saw her, I told her how much I loved her and how proud I was of her, and of the career she was building, and how when it took her away from Los Angeles, as it often did, I felt that it was silly to pine for my girlfriend, I wanted to pine for my wife.”

“It was quite the callback!” Caroline jokes.

After the proposal, the couple went into planning mode. Caroline’s parents love to host, and she knew that if she ever got married they would want the festivities to take place at their house. “Our relationship started with a kiss on the front lawn of my childhood home,” Caroline recalls. “So it seemed fitting that our marriage start with a kiss on the front lawn of my parents’ new home: a vineyard in Templeton, California.”

The aesthetic direction for the wedding began in an unlikely place: the bathrooms at the Sunset Tower Hotel. “There’s this fabulous wallpaper, designed by Donald Robertson, that’s a pattern of vignettes of quintessential Los Angeles living—we both adore it,” Nicholas says. “As soon as we got engaged, we reached out to Donald to commission a similar piece depicting scenes from our wedding weekend. It was a fun exercise, to describe in as much detail as possible an event that was 18 months in the future, but our description informed the piece, and the piece ended up informing the actual event. The flower garland that’s strung across the barn was a complete creation of Donald’s in his piece, but we fell in love with it and then asked our florist to replicate it in real life. The cake, too, was modeled after his depiction of our depiction.”

Flowers were chosen and arranged to look as though they’d been plucked right from the garden, using vases entirely from Caroline’s mother’s collection. Instead of an altar or a formal structure, the couple stood in front of vines, framed only by pampas grasses and flowers from the garden.

The bride’s wardrobe came together a little less organically. “I absolutely hated wedding dress shopping,” Caroline admits. “I don’t like shopping to start, and I have never had any interest in being a ‘pretty-pretty princess’ and—much to my horror—most shopkeepers did not understand my take on the bridal process. I was relieved to find a jumpsuit and cape I liked relatively quickly.” But then, six weeks before the wedding, it arrived, and it was the wrong size, the wrong fabric, and…completely see-through.

“While recounting this nightmare to my coworker—an agent who represents costume designers for film—he offered up an introduction to the designer Kym Barrett,” Caroline remembers. (Barrett’s credits span The Matrix to the Charlie’s Angels reboot and Shang Chi.) “She and I went to a vintage fabric store and had the most incredible time, discussing the movement and flow of different fabrics and bringing them outside to see how they responded to and played with sunlight. My good luck continued when we found a fabric that I had literally dreamt of, months earlier. I’ve never once dreamed of an outfit, much less a fabric, but it came to me in a day dream: large, patterned roses.”

The store did not seem to have enough of this fabric to make a dress, but Kym assured Caroline she’d make magic happen. Six days later—two weeks before the wedding—Kym’s seamstress presented Caroline with the perfect dress, without an inch of fabric to spare. “It was wild!” Caroline says.

The bride wanted to do something special for her “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” “My ‘something old’ was given to me by my father moments before walking down the aisle,” she says. “It was a 50 cent coin from 1834 he had saved from his childhood coin collection. My ‘something borrowed’ were teardrop pave diamond earrings my mother bought while going through chemo; they signified incredible strength to me. My something blue was a double-star sapphire ring my mother purchased in Jaipur during her travels in India. And my something new was my dress!”

The story surrounding Nicholas’s wedding weekend attire was far less dramatic. “It does also involve floral patterns though!” he notes. “I fell in love with a red Gucci suit from many years ago and had no luck sourcing it, so I set out to find a similar fabric of my dreams for our Rehearsal Dinner, which was an English garden party. I found the fabric—an oversized digital floral print that I’m sure was intended for curtains in some fantastically opulent grandmother’s mansion—and brought it to the suit maker, Klein, Epstein Parker. If you can’t go for it at your own wedding, when can you go for it? I was sure the suit maker would be impressed with my selection. ‘Is this not the craziest fabric you’ve ever worked with?’ I beamed, only to be informed that they make most of RuPaul’s suits from Drag Race.”

Nicholas was gifted a gold pinecone lapel pin when his grandmother passed away and wore it over his heart on his wedding day as both a reminder of late family members and his home in Oregon, where he grew up. “To match, I gifted my father, stepfather, and our officiant with gold lapel pins as we waited in the house before the ceremony,” he says. “It was a nice moment, to be able to share gifts that connected us all at the heart.”

During the ceremony, Nicholas’s mother read a children’s story that began with “Once upon a time there was an island where all the feelings lived…” “At first it felt a bit silly––a children’s story at your adult-child’s wedding,” Nicholas says. “But it quickly revealed itself to be a story of how true love grows out of time and time alone. It was so apt.”

Then it was time for vows. “I’d be happy to get up in front of every person I know and tell them about how much I love Caroline every day,” Nicholas says. “Unfortunately, when it came to my actual wedding day, I told them all how much I loved Kathleen.”

“He called me by the wrong name!” Caroline says. “It got quite a laugh; a welcomed moment of levity.”

“In my defense, I don’t even know a Kathleen!” Nicholas jokes. “I got ahead of myself and called her by her middle name.”

Afterwards, when it was time for dinner, the newlyweds stood on the second floor balcony overlooking the backyard where cocktail hour was raging, and rang a dinner bell. They then asked everyone to walk down the stairs into the garden where there was a single, 200-foot long table. Caroline wanted the evening to be both elegant and casual, so to go with the striking table, they served pizza and pasta family style, along with fresh grilled vegetables and peaches as sides.

“As citrus sorbet in frozen lime rounds were served to our guests, Nicky gave the final toast,” Caroline says. “There were a lot of tears at the table; you could hear people crying. It was really something else.”

“After eight years of dating, our families were close, but in the year and a half of planning the wedding, we all came together to dream up and execute something magnificent, as a team,” Caroline says. “I loved seeing our guests enjoy all the little details we spent so much time putting together, like turning my parents’ barn into our living room by hanging all our art from L.A. on the walls. Or seeing everyone up in the ‘stargazers circle’—an area in the vines we dressed with blankets and pillows and a bright green neon sign that read ‘Pappy’s Stash’: the name we’ve given to the strand of marijuana my father grows and harvests on the property. He hand-rolled 300 joints for our guests to enjoy. Weirdly, we didn’t find a single one left over the next day…”

“It’s funny the things that hit you the most. For me, it was our coffee cups,” Nicholas explains. “We bought those blue Anthora paper cups you get in New York that say ‘We Are Happy To Serve You’ a year before the wedding and then proceeded to forget all about them. When I saw our friends holding the cups on the dance floor, it hit me: so much time had passed since buying those cups, and in that time, an insane amount of energy and love and fun had gone into planning this weekend—so many details lovingly conceived of and executed by Caroline and myself and our parents—and it all came together perfectly.”