Some weddings you attend. Some weddings you never quite leave.
This one is close to our hearts in a way that’s hard to put into words. Sofia came into our lives as our daughter’s nanny, and stayed - working alongside us in the restaurant, the homewares store and on weddings as Leaves & Fishes found its footing. She knows this place the way very few people do. She knows where the light falls in the late afternoon, which corner of the rainforest walk goes still and golden just before sunset, and exactly what it feels like when a day here goes right.
Tom knew all of this when he got down on one knee at Leaves & Fishes and asked her to marry him. He knew she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
Eleven months later, she wasn’t.
The ceremony took place in front of the Colonnade on a stunning spring afternoon - Sofia walking down the aisle toward Tom and their 94 guests, the sandstone pillars softened by a single drape of fabric, the arches dressed in cascading calla lilies and florals in creams, burgundies and deep greens. A three-piece band played on the lawn. Tom is a musician, and from the very first note, everyone in that ceremony understood that the music at this wedding was going to be something special.
It was.
Cocktail hour followed - drinks from the cart, roaming canapés, the kind of easy afternoon banter that happens when a guest list is full of people who genuinely like each other. The spring light did what it always does at Leaves & Fishes at that hour - turned everything golden.
And then the guests turned the corner into the rainforest walk, and stopped.
A 27-metre long table stretched the full length of the canopy, dressed in simple, considered styling that Sofia and her mother had put together themselves and our on the day coordinator executed. Festoon lights strung overhead. The green of the palms closing in on either side. Ninety-four people seated together in one of the most quietly extraordinary dining rooms in the Hunter Valley - one that happens to be made entirely of trees.
The dinner was unhurried. A shared banquet served down the table gave guests the chance to reach across, pour for a stranger, start a conversation. Speeches were woven through the evening rather than stacked at the start - which meant the laughter and the tears arrived exactly when they were supposed to. The wine was good. The food was better. The vibes, as one guest put it, were somewhat magical.
Dessert came. And then, as the sweet plates were cleared, the guests made their way up the stairs to The Assembly.
For the first dance.
Tom’s mother stepped to the microphone. And sang.
There are moments at weddings that the room holds its breath for. This was one of them.
The band took over from there - Uptown Band, Tom’s own, who by this point had already proven themselves the finest wedding band this property has ever hosted. Nobody left. Nobody wanted to. Tom had written Sofia a song - her very own - and when he played it, there wasn’t a dry eye in The Assembly.
The night ended the way the best nights do. Too late, too happily, with no one quite ready to say goodbye.
We were lucky enough to be guests at this wedding. To sit at that long table, to watch Sofia’s face when Tom began to sing, to dance in The Assembly until the lights came on.
It reminded us, in the best possible way, why we do what we do.
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