When a wedding turns into a THREE part feature – you know this is one. good. wedding. And this California vintage wedding is the three-part kind. It’s not my fault really, blame Ryan Jensen and the copious amounts of cool photos he took! Ryan is a genius at setting the scene for the wedding.  Intimate moments  are captured and each detail accounted for with artistic ease and character, but he also paints a complete picture of your surroundings.  It kills me!  I blame him (read: my husband blames him) for my moaning all day about wanting to go back to Palm Springs!  However, I digress – I promised you more succulents and more succulents you will receive!  More coming SOON!  In the meantime, here’s Michelle, our bride, with some words about her wedding:

I was not the girl who had always dreamed of her wedding and, once engaged, knew that I wanted something a little less traditional. We visited a few venues closer to our home in Santa Monica but were quite uninspired until we found the Ace in Palm Springs. Paul and I were equally in love with it and all of our ideas/inspiration came from the Ace, the desert, and our own personal style (which is polished, modern and minimalist). We are both quite busy in our professional and personal lives, so the goal was to hire very talented vendors and then let go. We had been to two weddings photographed by Ryan Jensen and decided to fly him out from NY as we knew we could trust him with our special day. We then found Megan Fickling (from La Partie events) through wedding blog research and she helped us nail down the design/feel with an inspiration board based on the colors we chose and our interest in having a lot of succulents (both inspired by the desert setting). As we found our “save the date” and some other elements we wanted to include (Zinc letters from Anthropologie, etc.), the style started to define itself – modern but with some vintage flair. The most fun for us was being at the venue for a weekend planning session and imagining how much fun our family and friends would have, and a lot of our ideas stemmed from that desire for everyone to have a great time. We had family-style gourmet bbq catered by the Ace, which was phenomenal and created a relaxed/communal atmosphere. We had fun working on the music choices – Paul did the heavy lifting on that, the seating chart, and our website. Our wedding day was amazing! We were so prepared for things to go wrong (but also had decided that it would not bother us) but we had pretty smooth sailing. It was so fun to see how all of the elements came together (thanks to our wonderful vendors). Favorite moments: hearing the songs we chose for the ceremony, walking with each other down the aisle to be married, handing the bouquet off to my brother who was my maid of honor. Our dear friend, Rhett, was our officiant and wrote a beautiful and very personal ceremony and delivered it like a true pro. We also loved: amazing toasts by our “best men”, fabulous food and drinks, unique table settings and flowers, fun photo booth, great tunes, and having all of our favorite people in one place for the whole weekend, partying like rock stars.