An Impressionist Garden Wedding at La Bastide de Laurence

The main gown came from Sally Bean Couture. It took around three hundred hours of handwork: vintage lace, silk tulle inspired by the materials Christian Dior once used, and embroidered into it were British flowers and healing herbs, each with a meaning. Over the centre of the bodice sat a garden rose lifted from a piece of Edwardian French lace. Katie placed it exactly where she had held pain during her illness, and where she feels love.

The front of the gown remained light and romantic. The back carried more weight: blunter cuts, volume, the textured weight of everything she had carried forward. A metaphor, she says, for the body of work it takes to build a relationship, and for the strength of garden roses, delicate and resilient, surviving harsh seasons and returning fuller each year.

The morning of the wedding unfolded quietly. Hair and makeup moved between rooms in the bastide, the dress hung in the light of an open window, and the bridesmaids gathered for colour before the day began.

The weekend began on Friday evening in the courtyard of La Bastide de Laurence, where a welcome dinner was set beneath the plane trees to the live sound of Sinatra and La Vie en Rose. Katie wore a bespoke dress made from her own silk organza fabric, her watercolour paintings printed in with a green ground. She had also created the pattern on the linens and napkins. The dress code was retro British garden party: deeper, warmer colours, reds, burgundy, stone, greens.

It was the first time the guests had gathered together, and the courtyard held them in a way that set the tone for the days to come: Slim Aarons fused with Impressionism, old Hollywood meeting the south of France. Speeches, food, and wine from the local vineyard carried the night until late. By the end of it, the weekend had already begun to feel like the painting Katie had imagined.

Three floral arches framed the aisle, layered with loose, renaissance-style florals by a group of handpicked British florists who had travelled from the UK for the weekend. Rattan mango wood armchairs sat in the grass. The music, performed live, was Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi, written for rooms that ask for stillness.

"This is the greatest honour of my life," Katie's father said, as he took her arm. She was, by her own account, emotional by the time he gave her away, carrying into the moment the weight of everything she had been through in the years before the wedding. She says there is a photograph, somewhere, where you can see the tears.

The ceremony itself was quiet, almost a held breath: the vows, the exchange, the softness of the afternoon sun through the plane trees behind the arches. What the photographs return is what the couple wanted most. The sense that the day, in its slowness, had arrived exactly as they had imagined it.

For the reception, Katie changed into a second dress: a white silk Dior gown by Maria Grazia Chiuri, which she had already worn a day earlier for the pre-wedding photographs with Buck, because it sat so naturally beside his white Ralph Lauren outfit. The dress had become available three weeks before the wedding. She knew, when she put it on, that it was meant for her, and that she was well enough to dance in it.

Quiet portraits followed: the bride with a gilt mirror in the salon, the bride alone by the rose garden pool, a softer pre-wedding frame with Buck. Katie had spent years photographing other people's weddings. For her own, she asked her in-house team to work gently, and she trusted them to catch what they needed. What survives, across those few frames, is ease: two people quietly certain of each other.

The guest list was a mix of family and close creative friends, many of them artists, planners, stylists, florists, and musicians from across the industry. The dress code was retro garden party, loose and colourful, more Slim Aarons than formal black tie. Guests arrived in deep reds, burgundies, stone, greens, each outfit a note in the palette the couple had spent months building.

The bridesmaids wore painterly tones that sat softly against the florals and the stone of the bastide. The groomsmen wore classic black tie with their own small liberties. Together they form a gentle frieze of colour across the afternoon, a choreography Katie had imagined for months before she saw it walk toward the arches.

After the ceremony, guests gathered around the newly restored pool at La Bastide de Laurence, held in a rose garden that is at its fullest in May and June. Golden hour brought a warm sky and champagne, the Slim Aarons feeling the couple had wanted. There were no posed sequences; Katie had asked for it to stay relaxed, candid, in the moment.

The sun moved across the stone and softened the edges of the gardens. Guests moved between small clusters, glass in hand, while the light did the work the couple wanted it to do. It is the hour of the wedding, Katie says, that looks most like the paintings she had in mind when the design began.

As dinner began, one single raindrop fell across the long table, and then the sky cleared. The couple had been watching the clouds for hours. The table stretched through the lavender, scented with herbs and dusk, and the guests took their seats beneath warm lamps.

The speeches, Katie says, were emotional, funny, and tender. It was the first moment of the whole three-day arc in which she felt fully present, fully well, and fully there. At the end of them, a saxophonist came out to the table, played through the dinner, then walked the guests from their seats into the courtyard, where the night changed shape.

The courtyard had been built into a nightclub. A canopy had gone up across the stone, draped in lights. A DJ played alongside the saxophonist, an all-female cast of musicians the couple had chosen for this part of the night. Outside, a monsoon rain was falling; inside, the dance floor was dry, lit, warm.

"It was the first time in two years I felt free enough to dance," Katie says. "Feeling well, finally. That all the hard work and the journey we had been through together as a couple, had paid off." The floor stayed full until late. The band and the florists stayed longer, dancing with everyone else.

The design was led by Studio Sorores, with Katie art-directing alongside her planner Jessie, also one of the bridesmaids. Every surface of the wedding carried a thread of Katie's own work: watercolour paintings printed onto silk organza for two bespoke dresses by Wilden London, carried through onto linens and napkins by Alba Tableware, echoed in the colour of the florals at each stage.

The floral collaboration was, by the couple's design, unusual. Rather than one florist, Katie brought together a group of British florist friends, each of whom knew her and her work. Fleur de la Couture led the silk florals. Paula Roney Floral World led the fresh. Breige, The Little Flower Atelier, and Fox Flora completed the team, each one a dear friend. They worked through the heat to hold the renaissance palette across the three days.

The cake, by Yishi Cakes, was sculpted to mirror the dress, featuring lace, pearls, and silk. The tablescape came from The Luxe Collection UK. Stationery by Rose and Ruby. The welcome dinner, on Friday night, set the tone: a courtyard lit for Sinatra and La Vie en Rose, a dress code of retro garden party, and the first of three days that would each deepen in colour.

La Bastide de Laurence is a restored 17th-century Provencal estate on the outskirts of L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, two minutes from the town's canals and markets and twenty from the hilltop villages of the Luberon. The property spans twelve thousand square feet around a central courtyard, flanked by 200-year-old plane trees and a rose-ringed pool.

Two top French garden designers had shaped the grounds. Buck, a gardener himself, spent the three days quietly taking them in. The west grounds run to a sunset patio with a wood-fired pizza oven; the east grounds hold the ceremony lawn and the pool; the courtyard, enclosed by antique iron gates, became in turn a welcome dinner, a reception, and a nightclub. From above, the bastide reads as a long pale shape among the plane trees, its drive lined with olives, lavender, and cypress.