Their Château de Jalesnes wedding happened in France. It began in Japan.
Her first email arrived in March 2022, while Japan’s borders were still closed. Her mother is Japanese, much of her family was there, and around half the people they wanted at the wedding would already be coming from Japan. The original plan made complete sense. She asked to stay on our waitlist anyway. “I really do want you all to be my wedding planners!”
Japan stayed closed far longer than any of us expected, and in the end the geography moved. The wedding didn’t. By the time they married in the Loire Valley, it had passed through three countries: a plan for Japan, a Japanese garden in California, and finally France. Japan came with them.
A Wedding That Changed Countries
That July, while the bigger plan was still unresolved, we met them in Los Angeles. For their engagement photographs they chose the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden in Pasadena, made in the 1930s by the Japanese landscape designer Kinzuchi Fujii: ponds, a teahouse and a waterfall behind an otherwise ordinary residential street.
There was something quietly appropriate about photographing them there. They knew they would marry. They knew they wanted us there. The country was the only thing that wasn’t certain.
By October she’d settled the part that mattered to us: “We are totally set on having no one but you do our wedding photos, so we want to make sure we pick dates where you would be able to do the photos!” They chose their wedding date around our calendar. We love them.
For a while France and Japan sat side by side in the planning. We were still holding an old inn outside Tokyo for them when they found Château de Jalesnes. Eventually one place became possible in a way the other hadn’t, and they chose France. It would be easy to call that changing the wedding. It’s more accurate to say they changed its address.
A Château de Jalesnes Wedding, at Home for the Weekend
Château de Jalesnes was begun in the early seventeenth century and reworked in the nineteenth: pale Loire stone, slate roofs, a moat, formal gardens and long rooms worn smooth by centuries of other people’s lives. It’s an impressive place to arrive at. More importantly for this wedding, it was somewhere everyone could stay.
They planned a long weekend rather than a single day, from a rehearsal dinner the night before to a pool party the morning after, and the couple, their families, their friends and our team all lived in the house together.
That changes the rhythm. Nobody arrives dressed for a ceremony and disappears onto a coach a few hours later. People wake in the same house and meet over breakfast. Doors stay open between rooms. By the time everyone is formally dressed, the wedding has already been happening for hours.
Her brief had been wonderfully economical: “spring french garden / traditional / blush”. Jalesnes supplied much of that before anything was added. The house already knew how to be old. The clothes were chosen with the same care: two Galia Lahav gowns and Jimmy Choo shoes for her, Dior for him, and rings by Cartier and Jean Dousset.
A Celebration of Marriage
They had already done the legal part at San Francisco City Hall. The ceremony booklet at Jalesnes called what came next “A Celebration of Marriage”, and the phrase was exactly right. They weren’t repeating a legal ceremony in another country. They were gathering the people who knew what had led to it.
Their own beginning was considerably less dramatic. They met in law school in San Diego, introduced at a business law society meeting. He was a year ahead and lent her his “awesome outlines”. There were ramen dinners, and she was, by her own account, late to most of them. Then came five or six years of friendship, while the people around them, his best friend most of all, developed strong opinions about whether it would ever become anything more. Eventually it did.
The ceremony was unplugged: a reading from Corinthians, vows they’d written themselves, and an arch of loose garden flowers on the front lawn, with about forty people in front of them. Friends who had spent years wondering whether these two would ever get together were now watching them explain, in considerable detail, why they had. The answer had apparently required patience.
Rice came by the handful, at the arch and again at the door of the house.
Japan Came With Them
Halfway through a black-tie wedding in the Loire Valley, the couple disappeared. When they came back, she was in a white shiromuku, the formal Japanese bridal kimono, under a wataboshi hood, and he was in a black crested montsuki and striped hakama.
Nothing else about the setting changed. The château was still behind them, the French garden flowers still on the lawn, the same people drinking the same wine under the same Loire sky. And yet the photographs shifted completely.
Her mother is Japanese. Japan had been present from the first planning email: in the family they hoped would come, in a venue search on the other side of the world, and in a Japanese garden in California while the wedding itself was still unresolved. Changing countries hadn’t removed that part of the story. There was no need to explain why the kimono belonged. It already did.
That may be the more interesting thing about heritage at a wedding. It doesn’t always need its own themed moment or a paragraph in the programme. Sometimes it simply arrives with the people.
France, Fully
Bringing Japan with them didn’t make France any less present. Late May in the Loire gives an evening a remarkable amount of room. The light stayed for hours. In her second gown they went back outside, down the long lawn above the formal gardens, as the pale stone of the château warmed, then cooled, and the windows came on behind them.
There’s a temptation at a destination wedding to spend the whole day collecting recognisable pictures of the destination: the château, the gardens, the staircase, the façade. We photographed all of them. But the images we remember most came when the place stopped needing to identify itself: low sun through the trees, the two of them looking out over the gardens, her gown catching what was left of the evening. France wasn’t a checklist either. It was simply where they were.
One Long Table
Dinner was outside under the trees at one long table, with French food and wine, a live band, and speeches from people who had travelled a long way to share one stretch of garden for an evening.
Later everyone moved inside to the château’s stone hall for the first dance. Fireworks went up over the garden beside the cake, and for the dancing she changed once more, into a Dana Foley dress altered for her by a friend.
Because almost everyone was sleeping somewhere on the estate, the night skipped the usual destination-wedding ending of transport coordinators looking nervously at their watches. The bar stayed open. Nobody had a train to catch, so nobody left.
The Night Before
The evening before the wedding there was a rehearsal dinner outside, glasses raised, with the château behind the table.
Afterwards the two of them went out onto the lawn as the sun went down, and later to the iron gates in the dark. A night before is different from the day itself. Nothing is scheduled, nobody is waiting, and the house is still only a house.
What Travels
When they first wrote to us, this was supposed to be a wedding in Japan. If the borders had opened differently, the photographs would look nothing like these: no seventeenth-century château, no Loire garden, no long French evening. There might have been tatami, cedar, an old inn and another landscape entirely. It would still have been their wedding.
That’s what stays with us about this one. The destination changed, but everything with enough meaning survived the move: her Japanese heritage, the people they wanted beside them, the people they trusted to photograph it, and their own sense of what the celebration should feel like. Japan kept finding its way back in, first as a plan, then as a garden in California, then as white silk and black crests moving through a château park in France.
Months after the gallery arrived, they wrote to say they missed talking to us. More than two years after the wedding, they wrote again to make their album. And the route hasn’t ended. These days it runs back through Tokyo, where we catch up with them whenever they’re in town.
A destination can change. The centre doesn’t have to move with it. By the time everyone sat down together under the trees at Jalesnes, the wedding no longer belonged to any one country. It belonged to the route that had brought them all there. And the route that brought us all together. Forever grateful.
