admin On Saturday, Alexandra and Stefan wed at Casa De Pilatos, a 16th-century Andalusian palace. “I have always found courtyards enchanting, so I knew I wanted to hold my wedding in a series of courtyards. Robbins Otoya suggested we look for venues in Seville, which is a city full of courtyards. When we began searching for locations, one of our planners, Luis Otoya, described the aesthetic we were going for as ‘crumbly’ since we didn’t want the venue to look too perfect,” Alexandra says. “Casa de Pilatos is unassuming from the outside, but my jaw dropped when we walked in and I knew we had found what we were looking for: a stunning palace with many courtyards, lots of color, and the perfect amount of crumble.”
Alexandra wore a Monique Lhullier ostrich-feather ball skirt paired with a strapless corset, as well as a rhinestone-and-pearl veil. As an added statement, she accessorized with diamond-and-emerald drop earrings from Anmol Jewellers in Mumbai.
Her father walked her down the aisle to Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.” She met Stefan, wearing a Sarto Bespoke tuxedo, under a flower arch of bougainvilleas, peonies, and garden roses. Before their ceremony commenced, their officiant Reverend Jim Rooney asked the guests to “mingle.” “Reverend Jim opened the ceremony by asking all of our guests to move across the aisle and to introduce themselves to someone that they didn’t know,” Alexandra explains. “I had never experienced this before and was a bit skeptical at first, but I am so glad that we did it. The mingling gave me and Stefan a brief moment to ourselves, and also it added a warm and convivial atmosphere to the ceremony.”
Instead of traditional vows, the couple instead asked Reverend Jim to share the story of how they met. The ceremony reached its emotional apex when Stefan’s daughter, Lara, joined the couple at the altar. “Lara stood in between us for much of the ceremony. We shared our first kiss as husband and wife with Lara standing in between us and playing with the feathers of my skirt,” Alexandra says. “It was also important to us that she be part of the ceremony as well since this was the moment that the three of us officially became a family.”
After the ceremony, cocktail hour began in the walled garden of Casa de Pilatos. Here, a menu of creative libations took center stage: “Because of our family business, the cocktails were a particularly important part of our festivities. We created 20 signature cocktail recipes for the weekend (each event had distinct cocktails) and trucked a pallet of spirits from Poland. The recipes were created by Chopin’s in-house mixologist, Artur Wawrzyszczak, who is a true genius,” Alexandra says. As the evening grew later, guests wandered in awe into the main courtyard for dinner, where they served a watermelon gazpacho with idiazabal cheese ice cream, lobster salad, and wild sea bass.
