Dear all, today I would like to present you an event designer Mishka, from Mishka Designs, based in Puerto Vallarta. Leslie and ONE Happenings teamed up with Mishka to create a dream destination wedding for our bride and groom in Cabo San Lucas.
I am happy to host you in Cabo San Lucas, Mishka. You live in beautiful Puerto Vallarta, but I hope you like our small piece of paradise as well!
I love Cabos – honestly, when I first landed here I did think it a bit “ugly” – Puerto Vallarta (Or Vallarta as us locals call it) is very lush and green nearly year-round so I wasn’t prepared for the stark contrast to Cabos. But after a few hours (yes, literally a few hours!) I realized that Cabo was actually a really, really nice place. I loved walking around down town, the beaches I visited were lovely, the restaurants were yummy and the people I met were absolutely fabulous and friendly. I can’t quite share my thoughts (yet) on destination weddings in Cabos since this will be my first one, but so far the experience has been amazing! I usually do everything myself so it’s been a real joy for me to work with other vendors and create something together – there are A LOT more options in Cabos thanks to Yahwe from Del Cabo Event Design and his wonderful personality and style and access to things that I don’t have access to in Vallarta.
Vallarta has a beautiful downtown and a couple of nice beaches, good restaurants, etc. but the feeling is very different. It’s a bit hard to describe. Much of what I’ve been able to do in Cabos is much more “polished” – you have easier access to more things from the United States. In Vallarta, I have more access to hand-made artistic products because of our proximity to Guadalajara which hosts one of the largest artisanal shopping venues in Mexico called Tonalá. So more of what we do in Vallarta is hand-made and created specifically for each wedding. In Cabos, I’m able to utilize Etsy and some other United States based internet sites to find just the right shade of something or just the right product for what I am dreaming of. So, both very very fun experiences – just very different.
I am getting more and more excited for our upcoming wedding this Saturday, June 30. Can we give with our readers an insider’s view what will happen this Saturday? Would you share with us a glimpse of a design you created together with the bride?
I am super excited too! Pelin, our bride, and I clicked from the very beginning and it was amazing to work with someone who had an intrinsic understanding of design. I love every single detail of her wedding … the ceremony will have a chuppah like structure with beautiful ivory lace on top and soft fabric flowing on the sides but the real beauty will come from the hundreds of strung orchids and balsa wood which will hang as the backdrop.
We’re using apothecary jars to give a vintage feel but using them with modern touches – sprig of deadwood, a few sprigs of mini-roses, some succulents … there will be vintage looking wooden luggage tags for escort cards and beautiful papel picado like butterflies for place cards and fabric covered candles and I could go on and on … but suffice it to say that this will be a wedding to remember! I absolutely heart how Pelin really put her personal touch into nearly every decision we made and this wedding is really and truly a reflection of her and her groom as a couple.
We are flipping the ceremony space to be the reception space in a matter of an hour and fifteen minutes – I have flipped spaces before but never in that short amount of time and never with 11 tables! I am so excited about seeing the guests faces as they come back into the ceremony area for the reception!
What was the bride’s dream, and how did you help it realize with your wedding design?
I think every bride’s dream is the same, honestly – everyone wants something that reflects their hopes and wishes and sense of style but to do it in such a way that looks flawless and seamless. My job is to listen, ask the right questions, listen some more and figure out what the core desire and dream of each and every bride is so that we can create the perfect wedding for her and her groom. How I get there is different with everybody because each bride and groom are completely unique!
What were perhaps the challenges you needed to think of in advance to have a worry free wedding?
When I’m designing a destination wedding (which, to me, is a wedding not located in Vallarta), I always require that the bride has a local wedding planner. If the local planner is one of the best in their location, that is a super big plus, which is what I was happy to discover when I first met Leslie and her team of vendors. For me, it’s mostly about logistics of getting things from Point A to Point B – in this case things from both Vallarta to Cabo and from the States to Cabo. Honestly, that’s almost always my biggest challenge with a destination wedding. I run over and over a design in my head so many times that I feel like I know each one personally – as though it was one of my best friends … it’s amazing to put it together and see the vision in my head actually take shape in person. This will be the very first time I haven’t personally done the florals myself and will also be the very first time I haven’t had to make the tablecloths myself – Del Cabo has a wonderful connection with a place in the United States which ships down the tablecloths in the color you want – that may not sound like such a big deal to some people but to me that’s phenomenal!
What was for you the most exciting element in designing this wedding? Which elements did you use, any special details that you would mention…?
Honestly, everything was exciting to me – I love the challenge of combining a vintage element but giving it a more modern edge. There are so many details in this wedding that I would be hard pressed to pick one as the most exciting – I love the whole thing!
How do you get ideas for your event designs?
A better and easier question would be “what doesn’t give me an idea for an event design” [Mishka smiles]. Anything and everything is inspiring to me … colors, dresses, candles, pillows, a billboard sign, a song, an office product, a movie – I once designed multi-colored bottles for dance floor lighting based on a scene from The Princess and the Frog!
In the end, however, my biggest inspiration is the bride and groom themselves – I have a questionnaire I send at the very beginning of the design process which asks all sorts of questions from their favorite kind of flowers to their favorite holidays to how and where they met as a couple … from there I get inspiration and start researching … if they tell me they met at a Coldplay concert in Berlin then I will oftentimes look up the venue of that concert, I’ll listen to some Coldplay music, I’ll Google Map Berlin and walk around and, more often than not, that will inspire me to add some twist or touch of that experience into the wedding.
Through your eyes, how do you see the roles of wedding designers and wedding planners in creating a wedding?
I think a coordinator/planner handles the logistics of an event – they make sure that the music, the food, the organization, the how to get from Point A to Point B, connect the client with the right providers for their wedding, set the wedding day agenda, handle the transportation. A good coordinator makes sure that the event is on time and has timing – I LOVE timing … when you cut the cake, the fireworks go off. When you do your first dance, the beautiful, special lighting comes on … A good planner, to me, understands drama and timing because a wedding should have, in my opinion, at least a little bit of that. I will never forget when I was dancing my first dance with my husband way back when and a couple of friends of ours came up and started showering us with red rose petals during the dance – it was completely unexpected but absolutely romantic and the “kind of thing you see in movies.”
A Designer is responsible for anything and everything that encompasses the design … the flowers, the tablecloths, the napkins, the chairs, the lighting and the ambiance. A good design represents the couple as well as gives the couple and their guests a definite “wow” when they see it. I don’t want people to just think the wedding was “pretty” – I want people to think that the wedding was freaking fabtabulous – to be transported into the kind of thing you only see in a magazine or in a movie. On the other hand, I don’t want it to be so over the top that it’s uncomfortable – a good design is about finding that balance yet exceeding expectations.
The Designer creates the look of the cake. The Planner makes sure it tastes good
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Thank you so much Mishka, I look forward to our wedding this Saturday, and more weddings and events together in Cabo San Lucas and Puerto Vallarta!
My hats off to you Leslie – I’ve had so much fun working with you on this wedding and I cannot wait to see the end result of this one and look forward to the next one with great excitement!
Dear All,
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