A Garden Party in the Hudson Valley: Eva Amurri and Ian Hock at Windrift Hall
Photography by Taralynn Lawton, LUÁGO
They met at his restaurant. She was very pregnant, newly divorced, and not looking for anything. He proposed two years later in the garden of the Rodin Museum in Paris, her favourite museum in the city. These things have their own timing.
For the wedding, they chose Windrift Hall in New York’s Hudson Valley. Eva designed much of it herself, working from a French garden party sensibility: natural tones that mirrored the landscape, chamomile threaded through the bouquet and the cake, pale hints of green and blue. Considered without being contrived. The kind of design language that comes from someone who knows what she wants because she’s already learned what she doesn’t.
Forty people. Not a crowd but a room of faces you know by heart. Taralynn Lawton photographed the day at that scale, close in, unhurried. Her images hold the hand-fasting ceremony that bound Eva, Ian, and her three children together with ribbons each of them had chosen. Major, Eva’s seven-year-old son, walking his mother down the aisle. Handwritten love letters read aloud as vows.
Eva wore a Kim Kassas strapless corseted gown, vintage in feeling, then changed for the reception into a second Kim Kassas piece: a feather-trimmed mini dress with floral lace and sparkle, paired with custom pearl-embellished Nike Air Force Ones bearing their wedding date. Susan Sarandon arrived in a custom floral SuitShop suit that sat exactly right against the garden.
Then came the food, which at a celebration hosted by two people for whom cooking is a shared language, was never going to be an afterthought. Grounded Catering cooked over open flame: Hudson Valley duck, cedar plank salmon, vegetables and salads from the farms surrounding the estate, all served family style. Local wines, craft cocktails, a vanilla cake with macerated raspberries and Italian meringue buttercream dressed in chamomile.
A first dance. Then a family dance with all three children. Then the kind of evening where no one checks the time.
As featured in PEOPLE. Photography by Taralynn Lawton, LUÁGO.
