“It’s not very romantic or exciting, but we met on Hinge, while we were both living in Los Angeles,” cookbook author and recipe developer Alexis deBoschnek says of how she connected with Ryan Nethery, a director of photography. “Both of us went into the first date with low expectations—I had just quit my job and was about to go to Europe for a month. Ryan had moved to L.A. six months prior,” Alexis shares. “We ended up going on three dates in a week before my trip and texted the entire time I was gone.” A sure sign they were committed to each other? He picked her up from LAX when she got back from her travels.
After two-and-a-half years together, Ryan proposed at their home in the Catskills—which was also Alexis’s childhood home. “It was the first snow of the season in 2021, and Ryan suggested we go on a walk up our hill to take it all in,” she recalls. “When we got to the top and took in the expanse of the Catskill Mountains, he got down on one knee behind me and asked me to marry him. While our first meeting wasn’t particularly romantic, our proposal definitely made up for that!”
Immediately after getting engaged, the pair knew they wanted to wed at their 100-acre Icelandic horse farm. “We throw dinner parties every few weeks and wanted our wedding to feel like a giant dinner party with lots of flowers, drippy candles, and amazing music,” the bride says.
The couple took on planning the wedding themselves, and Alexis hired Josh of Wild Form Collective as the day-of coordinator. Friends came together to fill in the roles of other vendors. Lisa Przystup spent two days on the florals from Bovina Fleurs and Catskill Blooms, while Meagan Bennett the stationery and made two whimsical wedding cakes. A local candle maker and ceramicist were also called upon to lend their talents to the day, making it feel like a community affair.
For Alexis’s summer wedding, she had a strong sense of what she wanted to wear. “I tend to go for classic silhouettes without a lot of embellishments,” she explains. While browsing LOHO Bride’s online sample sale, she made a quick decision to purchase her Savannah Miller dress. “I love the shape of it, but what really sold me was the dramatic low back. By a stroke of luck it happened to fit me perfectly and the only alteration it needed was to get hemmed by a few inches.”
On the day-of, Alexis got ready with a hairstylist and Marco Campos, who made her look like the best version of herself. The bride styled her sleek dress with sparkly Loeffler Randall block heels, long veil from Ann-Marie Faulkner, and pearl earrings that her grandmother gave her before she passed.
On August 12, 2023, the pair wed under a massive willow tree. “It’s the first thing we see every morning when we wake up, which made the spot feel particularly special,” Alexis shares. One of the couple’s best friends, Hannah Leighton, officiated the ceremony and walked their pup, Ruby, down the aisle as Lark Strings played a soft melody. “Ryan and I bucked tradition and walked down the aisle together, which helped ease both our nerves. It was so surreal to walk down the aisle together and see all our friends and family standing and clapping for us.”
After being announced as officially wed, cocktail hour began. “Good food was of the utmost priority to me, and I knew having a bunch of my food media friends in attendance, we would really need to pull off all the stops to impress them,” Alexis says. “We tapped our friend Danny Newberg, who used to cook at Estela in New York City, and now runs a catering company called Joint Venture to do the food. Danny cooks everything over an open fire which is really dramatic but also imparts so much amazing flavor. We wanted to highlight the amazing farms and purveyors around us and Danny totally got the vision.”
Guests enjoyed a raw bar, West Kill Brewing beers, and cocktails with floral ice cubes—crafted by the bride herself—before they got to an overflowing harvest table of local cheeses, vegetables, and charcuterie. On everyone’s seats there were custom floral illustrations, done by Alexis’s mother, and hand-written personalized notes to each of the couple’s loved ones. “It was so fun to watch people take their seats and read the cards and felt like it set the stage for the next portion of the night,” Alexis says. Dinner followed with a delicious menu of chicken and slow-roasted lamb.
One of the best things about getting married at home with only sparse neighbors? No curfew. At 11:00 p.m., a tray of burgers and rhubarb and elderflower syrup jello shots made their way around to keep people well-fueled. The party went on until the last person was too tired to keep on dancing.
