She made a few subtle changes: buttons were added down the back, while her blusher veil was altered to sit slightly higher so that her flowers would remain visible beneath its lace trim.
For her jewellery, Lauren borrowed a pair of seven-carat diamond earrings that had belonged to her great-aunt and had since been worn by generations of women on her father’s side of the family for their weddings. “I also wore a necklace and bracelet that had been part of my First Holy Communion jewellery, and had them reworked so that the cross fell down my back,” she says.
She made her own pearl necklace too, using individual pearls sourced in the years since the couple’s engagement, and created matching versions for the bridesmaids. There was just one hitch: “They actually forgot to bring theirs to the wedding, which was hilarious,” she says. “They wear them all the time - just not at the wedding!”
In many ways, it was perfectly in keeping with Lauren’s approach to the celebration: plan the important things, then leave enough room for the unexpected. “I love baking in time for serendipity and allowing life to just happen,” she says. “That’s one of the things I enjoy most about travelling, weddings and life in general - when you give people an environment where they can just be, and things magically keep working out.”
Carmel, a small beach city on California’s Monterey Peninsula, offered just that. “It felt like a place where we could plan one thing a day and let everything else fall into place. We could all be together, wander around and explore.”
The wedding itself took place on 24 July, with the ceremony held at Carmel Mission, a historic Catholic church. Even here, plans changed at the last minute. “The priest I’d grown up with had intended to marry us in California, but ended up having to fly to Malaysia and so could no longer make it.” Luckily, their wedding coordinator found a replacement a week before the wedding and the ceremony went ahead exactly as they’d hoped.
Afterwards, guests moved to Earthbound for cocktails and a farm-to-table dinner, before dancing to a playlist Lauren and Steven had filled with songs that meant something to them and their friends and family.
One of the most memorable moments came at the end of the night, when the DJ played John Mayer’s Daughters and invited all the mums and daughters onto the dancefloor. “Some of my cousins had chosen to come without their husbands, so it was basically a mother-daughter trip for them,” Lauren says. “There were at least eight mother-daughter groups there. It was so sweet.”
