Michelle Rago, Ltd.—Blog

Recently we designed a wedding at Cipriani’s 42nd Street in New York city. This Bowery building, built in 1921, is an Italian renaissance masterpiece featuring soaring marble columns, a 65 foot ceiling, magnificent inlaid floors and glorious chandeliers. It boasts a national and New York city landmark interior.

At the entrance of the building we centered a custom built black lacquer table for the seating cards. Two arrangements in green porcelain urns with manzanita branches and hand-wired cymbidium orchids were lit from above. We adorned the branches with hanging chinese lanterns and mounded dinathus petals (used in traditional chinese medicine) at the base.

Grooves were cut into the table to nestle the seating cards.

There is a gate that separates the entry and cocktail area from the dining room. It is necessary to screen off the back of the gate so guests can not see into the dinner. Below is a simple and three dimensional approach to sprucing up the gate.

Note-we filled the base of the gate columns with dianthus petals and votives to create more interest.

There were two looks for the cocktail tables. Bamboo bird cages were filled with a small pieces of manzanita and hand-wired with cymbidium orchids. We placed capiz shell lotus votives around each cage.

The low cocktail tables had centerpieces that matched the seating card table urns.

The dining room was a knock out of bold color and unique lighting. We built 6 foot black laquer lamp posts with red silk dupioni shades.

Linens were red silk dupioni. Napkins were dyed to match hemstitch adorned with a burgundy cymbidium orchid. At the base of the lamp posts we clustered arrangements of dahlias and scattered dianthus petals.

Above and below are wonderful examples of how lighting transforms the room. The patterns were bold and washed the entire room through out the evening.

Two other notable design elements are the red shimmer curtain anchoring the stage and oval table tops as an alternative to rectangles.