Emily and Jonathan
Bristol, RI
the details
The Venue:
Blithewold Mansion
The Bride:
Emily Kochman
The Groom:
Jonathan Tillman
vendor resources
Wedding Flowers
Sayles Livingston Flowers
Little Compton, R.I.
sayleslivingstonflowers.com
401-635-9500
Wedding Photography
Alternate Angles
Waltham, MA
alternateangles.com
781-788-8753
Wedding Cake
Garrison Confections
Providence, R.I.
garrisonconfections.com
401-490-2740
Wedding Invitations
Unique Artistry
Chicago, IL
uniqueartistry.com
312-751-2928
Before marrying on August 26th of 2005, Emily Kochman and Jonathan Tillman had become quite adept at racking up sky miles. When the couple started dating in 2002, Emily was a senior at the University of Chicago and Jonathan was working for HotJobs.com in Washington, D.C.; the two jetted back and forth to visit each other as often as possible. From the start, Jonathan knew Emily was the one; it took Emily just slightly longer to be sure. Yet when Jonathan visited Emily in South Africa, where she spent the second semester of her senior year, any doubts melted. It’s not every guy, after all, who jets half way around the planet to spend Valentines Day with his sweetheart.
“When he walked off the plane in Africa, I thought, this is it. This is my husband,” says Emily.
Sure enough, in July of 2004, Jonathan proposed to Emily on a rainy afternoon in Providence, where the couple was living. Emily said yes, of course, and watched Jonathan slip a precious-cut diamond engagement ring onto her ring finger. A few months later, the couple began searching for a reception site in Rhode Island, where they planned to settle down. After looking at several coastal venues, including a few Newport mansions, they selected Blithewold Mansion, Gardens & Arboretum in Bristol, a venue that boasts a Queen Anne style mansion and lush, rambling grounds, including a rose garden, a bamboo grove and a ten-acre “Great Lawn” that sweeps down to meet the waters edge.
“When we visited other mansions,” Emily explains, “you could see weddings going on at the mansions right next door. I knew I wanted something that was outdoors but I also wanted a site that was private. Blithewold was perfect. It’s private and has an amazing view of the bay.”
Passing the Personality Test
When it came to wedding planning, Emily and Jonathan were decidedly laissez faire. “We just wanted our wedding—and the wedding planning—to be fun,” says Emily. “We automatically eliminated any vendors who were a little too stiff or formal. We tried to work with people whose personalities fit ours.”
After the couple selected vendors, they felt comfortable turning over responsibility and judgment to the experts. For example, Emily simply told her florist at Sayles Livingston that the wedding’s color scheme would be cream and sage green and that she liked hydrangeas. “When I first saw my bouquet,” says Emily, describing her bouquet that included hydrangeas, green cymbidium and lisianthus, “I thought ‘My God, this turned out to be more gorgeous than I ever imagined.’ ”
For invitations, the couple discovered a Chicago-based company called Unique Artistry that sews borders onto paper for a handcrafted aesthetic. Emily relayed her color scheme and left the company to create charming, one-of-a-kind invitations of a slim rectangular shape and stitched borders with little threads dangling off the end.
Reflecting her easygoing style, Emily simply asked her two bridesmaids—a sister and a best friend from childhood—to select dresses within the color scheme; she let them choose the style and fabric. Their choice, satin dresses in a sea foam green, complimented her simple yet stunning, mermaid-cut wedding dress beautifully.
“We tried not to do things at our wedding that weren’t us,” says Emily of the planning process. “It’s not us to have fancy table settings, for example. We wanted the wedding to reflect our personality.”
Although their wedding was certainly unpretentious, fun and intimate—the couple only invited 85 guests so they would have a chance to spend time with everyone—it also shined with an understated grace, from Emily’s dress, which she adorned with star-shaped crystal earrings and no necklace, to the color scheme, which complemented Blithewold’s serene, verdant outdoor setting.
An Uninvited Guest
On the Friday of the wedding, the weather cooperated winningly. As 5p.m. approached, when the reception was due to begin, the temperature hovered in the mid-seventies and the sky was a hazy blue.
As the guests sat on the Great Lawn overlooking Narragannsett Bay, Emily made her way down from her dressing room in the mansion. “My brother walked be down the stairs from the mansion because I was afraid I’d trip over my train and fall down!” says Emily, laughing at the memory.
After a walk down the grassy aisle, escorted by her father, Emily faced Jonathan at the altar. “I remember this moment so clearly,” says Emily. “He was tearing up and I was trying to make him laugh. I think he was more nervous than I was.”
During the non-denominational ceremony conducted by a Justice of the Peace, guests watched Emily and Jonathan exchange vows as the sun began to slink slowly down toward the water, creating a diffused, warm glow. Although the ceremony went smoothly, Emily recounts that she sensed a stir among the guests at one point. She later learned that an intrepid skunk decided to crash the ceremony, making a few guests a little nervous. “He threatened to ruin our wedding!” Emily jokes.
After the wedding service, Emily and Jonathan had their photos taken, as a couple and with their families. “Getting our photos taken was the best,” recalls Emily. “We were able to focus on each other and the fact that we were married. The rest of the night we spent so much time walking around talking to people that it wasn’t until the end of the night that we were alone together again.”
Following a cocktail hour on the mansion’s deck, guests moved to a large white tent where dinner and dancing rounded out the evening. Eschewing the formality of a sit-down meal and assigned seating, guests were invited to help themselves at the many different stations—including an Asian stir fry station and a buffet serving beef tenderloin and chicken with grilled vegetables—and then pick a table of their choice. After dinner plates were cleared, out came the wedding cake—a delicious, tiered tiramisu affair. “I was surprised to see the frosting was orange,” says Emily, explaining that due to some unexpected confectionary alchemy, the simple dark brown chocolate frosting had taken on an orange hue. Yet the orange frosting and uninvited skunk were the only things that strayed from nuptial plans. For Emily and Jonathan, such small mishaps simply provided fodder for jokes later on.
When the DJ played Alicia Keye’s soulful “If I Ain’t Got You,” Emily and Jonathan stepped onto the floor for the first dance. Following a parent dance, to Stevie Wonder’s “You are the Sunshine of my Life,” the entire crowd was lured onto the dance floor with a broad range of songs—from infectiously fun ditties, including hits by Rod Stewart and Abba, to more slower numbers by Van Morrison, Marvin Gaye, and Coldplay.
“We made a list of songs for the DJ,” Emily explains. “So there were no surprises.” She adds, with a laugh, “We told her, ‘we don’t want the Macarena or hokey pokey!’”
For their honeymoon, the couple waited until winter holidays and jetted of to South Africa, where they were able to spend over two weeks—a luxurious amount of time compared to the Valentine’s Day three-day whirlwind a few years earlier.