Wedding Florist in White Plains, NY · Hotel Ballrooms, Downtown Restaurants & Courthouse Elopements

A hotel ballroom in White Plains is a big carpeted box with a drop ceiling and a chandelier, and it punishes small ideas. Mass first: the thing guests see when the doors open has to read from the back wall, so the arch is ten feet tall, half the centerpieces are tall, and a medium budget goes into ten spectacular tables and twenty simple ones rather than thirty slightly sad ones. Then light, because there's none coming in: pearl draping over the drop ceiling, amber uplights on the walls, pin spots on every table, and candles at three heights. The seating chart is two charts or an escort wall twelve feet wide, since one wall of three hundred names backs up into the lobby, and there are two bars, both dressed.

The restaurants along Mamaroneck Avenue and around the train station host the smaller weddings and most of the engagement parties: forty people, one long table, a runner under ten inches, a mantel or a window dressed as the backdrop, built in place an hour before. The hotel suites host the getting-ready morning, which is where the bouquets arrive by one o'clock, in water, ahead of the photographer.

More Westchester couples than you'd guess marry at the county courthouse on a Thursday and celebrate that evening or that summer. An elopement bouquet, a boutonniere, a few bud vases for dinner after: it's a real order and it gets the same care as a ballroom. Several couples have come back a year later for the bigger party with the same palette.