Italian Dolomites Elopement // Aylah and Eamonn

We’re a couple are currently live in Auckland. Aylah is a Marketer in Tech and Eamonn is an Officer in the New Zealand Army. We’re both small town people, Aylah grew up in Rarotonga and Eamonn originally from Australia, moved to Nelson when he was 10. We don’t believe in fate but are so happy that our paths to cross 6 and a half years ago at a pub in Ponsonby. We had this amazing connection from the start that felt like we’d known each other for a lifetime. Our love for traveling to remote parts of the world has given us the perfect foundation for our relationship. We’re both ambitious and spontaneous people who look at life as a series of adventures. I love that we’ve done everything in a backwards order.  It’s made us realise how much alike we are and in the ways that we’re not, we complement each other’s little quirks. 

Tell us about your special day…was there a specific theme or style? Tell us a little about the setting, the styling and some of your favourite details…

We share the same values and thoughts about how we wanted our wedding day to go. We know that we wanted a marriage and to celebrate our love for one another, but we didn’t want to leave our families out of our celebrations. The plan changed a little bit. We secretly eloped and exchanging our vows under the Italian Dolomites and had a celebration with our friends and family in Nelson 6 months later. We fell in love with Italy while traveling in 2017, and the Dolomites felt like the right place for us. Not that we’re hopeless romantics but spending 5 months apart and running off to Italy to elope without our family knowing is pretty darn romantic. The only thing we’d locked in for our original Nelson wedding was our photographer. I sent a long apology email about our change of plans, but to our surprise Ana emailed back saying that she was planning a trip to Italy with her sister while we would be over there and that she would love to still be our photographer. I’ll never be able to say thank you enough to this amazing woman. Ana is incredible at what she does and went above and beyond our photographer. I’ll be forever grateful. We knew having a few close friends with us would make our day special. Even with the short noticed they said they’d be there! Eamonn and I spent the night before in the same room, it was lovely to wake up together and get ready. With an already early morning start, we gave ourselves 45 minutes to get dressed and head out to the lake. We had our first look along the water’s edge and exchange our vows underneath a mountain reflection arch with our closest friends as witnesses. To celebrate we toasted with a glass of bubbles which may not have been the best decision seeing that we’d all been up since 5am and no one had breakfast. Once our ceremony was over, we walked the long way around the lake to the cars. Our next adventure was to find food. We stopped at a little town called Monguelfo Tesido Welsberg on our way back to the accommodation. The town was quiet and empty until we got to the piazza. The whole village was there for their annual chocolate carving festival! It was magical. Our wedding meal was traditional German dishes, with a pint of German beer while watching a live Volksmusik band. We played giant outdoor wooden games and our wedding cake were homemade macaroons. We planned absolutely nothing apart from where we would exchange our vows and it ended up being the most amazing day with everything we love and hoped for.

Tell us about your main outfits, what was unique, is there a story?

I wore the Arizona dress from Leave Her Wilder. As soon as we walked into Leave Her Wilder, Greer made us feel so welcomed and I just had a feeling that this was the place. The Arizona dress was the first dress I tried on in green and knew it was the one. It was beautifully simple, elegant and made me feel like a bride. Their dresses are traditionally bridesmaids’ dresses and they hadn’t created the Arizona dress is white before. But I knew it’d be perfect. Eamonn wore a smart Rodd and Gunn blue suit with his lucky RM Williams boots