Avila Beach Hotel, Curaçao · January 2025 · by Ghislaine van de Laarschot
Planned by Caribbean Blue Weddings
Her grandmother asked one question. Ten years later they married on a pier in Curaçao.
Their story
Erica and Derek met in 2015 at a bar on Long Island and became friends, in the way people become friends when neither of them is going to say the other thing out loud. It lasted about two years before life moved them in separate directions. Neither of them stopped thinking about the other.
In 2021 Erica's grandmother asked, apparently in passing, whether she'd heard from Derek lately and whether she still thought about him. The question stayed put. A few weeks later Erica FaceTimed him with no warning at all. He picked up immediately, and ten minutes after that he walked into the bar where she was sitting.
He proposed at her hometown tree lighting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Erica takes Christmas seriously enough that she had invited everyone she knew to it, which meant she had accidentally arranged her own audience. As the countdown ran he got down on one knee, in front of a few thousand strangers and considerably more friends and family than she had realised were standing there.
The day we created
Erica's inspiration board was greenery, soft light and almost no flowers. Clean and quiet, and beautiful, but it could have belonged to anyone.
The thing that made it theirs was sitting in the corner of one of her cake photographs: a cracked coconut, barely in shot. Half coconuts on the tables with candles burning inside them, and from there the whole design had somewhere to go.
The ceremony was on the pier at Avila, water on both sides, minimal blooms and earthy tones against the wood. It was one of the hottest January days in memory, and the light at the end of it made up for all of it.
Dinner moved to the pool beach. Farm tables under cream runners with a line of greenery running the length of them, floating candles in glass, pillar candles between, and the coconuts glowing low along the middle. Erica wanted assigned seating without a board announcing it, so one of the palm trees became the seating chart instead, individual leaves hanging from it with each guest's table.
There was a tequila station, small and deliberately hard to walk past. The DJ played, and between the shots and the coconuts and seventy people who had waited ten years for this, the beach stayed full.
