Las Vegas Wedding Planner Andrea Eppolito. Video by M Place Pro.

To say that I am excited about this design is an understatement! Not just the design, the entire process of presenting the design and taking my clients, Keyana and Michael, through an experience that has been 100% completely tailored to them.

Keyana and Michael got engaged in January and reached out just before heading to Dubai to celebrate their upcoming wedding. We got to know one another over text messages and Instagram, but the real fun came when they returned and we had our first in-person meeting. I don’t like to jump right into wedding planning with my couples. Instead, I try to keep my first meetings casual and laid back. My focus is on getting to know my clients as people first before I usher them into the role of bride or groom. Over lunch, we discussed their love of fashion and travel, their shared love of music and cars, and we bonded over the trials and tribulations that come with renovating a home. Notes and ideas were forming in my head, and while Keyana had her fashion direction solidly set, I asked if she would be willing to abandon all of the images she had collected on Pinterest and Instagram and grant me the latitude to just play with an idea that I had.

There was this off-the-cuff comment that she had made during lunch about the way she was decorating her house. It's sparked something in me that led me down a path of designing something that was one part residential, one part showroom, and wholly unique. I spent over two months refining the design with Javier Valentino and the team at Blueprint Studios, and another month working on renderings. Once the storyboards and the narrative were set, I simply needed a way to present them that felt special enough and honored the work that we were planning to do.

After 10 years, I still get butterflies when I present a design to my clients no matter how confident I am that I've gotten it right. There's a tremendous amount of vulnerability in standing in front of someone and saying, “Here, I made this for you…” There is also so much anxiety on the part of the couple. Did they make the right choice in booking me? Did I get it right? Will the design really be all about them or is it just another beautiful wedding?

I am SO PROUD to say that I get it SO RIGHT!

I am keeping the design of this wedding tightly under wraps and will start to share my behind-the-scenes videos in the week leading up to production. But for now, I wanted to give you a hint of what's to come and show you how I presented to Keyana and Michael. This is just a little bit of my process.

For this demo, we built a private art gallery and presented the couple my design on fully rendered boards that were set up throughout. It was a full production PRE-production, but worth it in order to showcase the once-in-a-lifetime design that is progress. Many thanks to my friends at Javier Valentino, Blueprint Studios, DBD las Vegas and M Place Pro, not to mention Cut & Taste, ARIA, and many more who are coming together to bring this wedding to life.

Mark your calendars and get ready for our video series dropping on August 30th. Until then, thank you for following along!

Always…a