Karakter, Curaçao · March 2023 · by Ghislaine van de Laarschot
Planned by Caribbean Blue Weddings
They met on a screen, an ocean apart. They married in Curaçao, with only the people who mattered most.
Their story
Kinga is Polish, Sven is Dutch, and for a long stretch the only thing they shared was a screen and a time difference. They met online, kept meeting online, and built the kind of certainty that usually takes being in the same room. She brings the spark. He brings the steadiness. Neither of them seems to need the other to be anything else.
When it came time to marry, they didn't want a big room full of people. Both had careers that don't pause easily, and what they wanted was small: thirteen in total, counting themselves, somewhere warm, somewhere neither of them was from. Curaçao made sense precisely because it belonged to neither of them. New ground, chosen together, which is more or less how they had done everything else.
They found it at Karakter, on the west coast at Coral Estate, where the beach is small, the sun goes down directly in front of you, and thirteen people don't rattle around.
The day we created
The whole design came from one flower. Kinga settled on the Bird of Paradise early, and once she had, everything else followed: burnt orange, deep purple, a shape that takes up space without asking permission.
Everything happened at Karakter, ceremony through to the end of the night. With thirteen people there was no reason to move anyone anywhere.
We let those brights lead and gave them somewhere to land. Dusty blue napkins to cool the table down, gold running through the details to warm it back up. Set against the sand and the water at Karakter, colours that would have looked bold anywhere else just looked right.
The cake broke the rules on purpose. One tier, a single Bird of Paradise on top, and beneath it a cascade of macarons in orange, green, white and purple spilling down the table. It was the first thing guests walked toward and the last thing anyone stopped photographing.
That's the thing about a wedding this size. Nobody watched from the back of a room. Everyone was close enough to touch.
