Avila Beach Hotel, Curaçao · January 2026 · by Ghislaine van de Laarschot
Planned by Caribbean Blue Weddings
Their friend told each of them that the other wanted brunch. They could both hear her doing it.
Their story
Jessica and Bogdan met because their friend Jenny got tired of waiting for them to work it out themselves.
One morning after a night out, Jenny told Bogdan that Jess wanted to get brunch with him. Then she turned around and told Jess that Bogdan really wanted to get brunch with her.
Both of them could hear her doing it.
Brunch happened anyway, and that was that. Eight years of shared friends and shared history later, they have the kind of thing that holds its shape through all the changes around it.
Bogdan put the wedding better than we could. They invited everyone they love to a beautiful island to let them know they were carrying on together.
The welcome
The weekend opened at SAL the Kitchen, which is exactly the right room for a first night. Relaxed, good-looking, good food, and no ceremony to sit through. Fifty people who had flown in from different places got to be in one place together before any of it started properly.
The wedding day
They had one non-negotiable: everything in one location. No transfers, no working out where to be next, no part of the day spent moving fifty people around an island.
At Avila that meant the pool beach did all of it. A violinist played the ceremony. Then, while everyone was at cocktails, the beach where they had just said their vows became the room they ate dinner in, and the floor they danced on, inside an hour. Guests came back to a space that looked as though it had always been that way, which is the entire point and the only version anyone should ever notice.
What they wanted from the design was timeless and clean: white flowers and a lot of greenery. Around that we built a modern asymmetrical arch, round tables laid out in a serpentine line so the room curved rather than gridded, candlelight throughout, and centrepieces kept deliberately low so people could see and talk across them.
The personal things were what held it together. A memory table. A Polaroid station people actually used. And beach games, which sound like a small idea and were not: giant Jenga, cornhole, a photo scavenger hunt, all of it pulling guests into the day rather than seating them in front of it.
After the sun went down, fire dancers. Then an afterparty at Fènsi, one more round and one more dance, and fifty people who had spent two days together not especially wanting to go to bed.
