Audrey Le Strat and Matthew Hussey, the creative director and CEO of a relationship coaching company, first met at a friend’s engagement party in London. “I was told by a friend on the way there that there was a woman who would be there that the other guys were all in love with. The moment I walked in and saw her standing there with her friends I knew who they meant,” Matthew says of his first glimpse of Audrey. “There happened to be a big boxing match that night that they were showing on a TV in the pub, and she noticed I kept getting distracted by it. She pretended—the one and only time in our relationship—to be interested in boxing and asked me questions about it. It worked. We talked to no-one else for the rest of the night.”
After around two years together, Matthew proposed in London. They were doing long-distance between Los Angeles and London, and Matthew flew across the pond from California to surprise Audrey. “I had the ring on me, and I knew I wanted to do it while I was in London, but I didn’t know when,” he explains. “There was this moment where she was in her pajamas sitting on our bed, and for some reason, I just felt an urge to do it there and then. All I remember was her smile, her wide eyes, and her excitedly saying, ‘What?! Really?!’ over and over, while I waited for her to say yes. There was also some jumping on the bed! We are both introverts who love more than anything else our time together away from the world. It was perfectly us.”
Once engaged, the pair loved the idea of making a new memory somewhere and giving their guests an excuse to travel somewhere they normally wouldn’t. “I’m from England and Audrey is from France, so we were looking for something that had the old-world feel of the places we grew up around,” Matthew shares. Their planners from Lynden Lane Co. scouted Italy for venues and found the perfect countryside locale in Sicily that ticked all of their boxes. “We did everything we could to work with Lynden Lane, and they said yes. People joked we were the the most relaxed bride and groom they’d ever seen, but it was all because of them. They have amazing tastes and an ability to see our vision before we could.”
For his autumn nuptials, Matthew worked with stylist Cassandra Sethi of Next Level Wardrobe, who helped him with his custom black tuxedo with a shawl lapel.
And as often happens, Audrey ended up circling back to the first wedding dress she had ever tried on. “It was a classic, figure hugging dress from Pronovias with a sweetheart neckline, exposed back, and a three-meter-long train,” she describes. Her “something old” was the most sentimental part of her look, her late father’s wedding band, which she had resized to fit her finger.
On October 21, 2023, guests gathered outside the main gates of a 19th-century Sicilian estate for the alfresco ceremony. Audrey was jokingly adamant that Matthew “had to cry,” when he first saw her at the end of the aisle. “She needn’t have worried. I started welling up before I even walked down the aisle,” the groom states. “I felt overwhelmed by the gravity of it, by the love that encased us, and by how lucky I already felt to be marrying this extraordinary human being. As I stood under the arch of the gates watching the processional, I had tears in my eyes the entire time.”
The couple’s friend, Jon Turteltaub, led the meaningful service. And the couple exchanged personal vows. “It was the most special experience of both of our lives,” Audrey says of the ceremony. “We felt like even if we weren’t getting married, it would still have been one of the best days of our lives, a uniting of everyone who had helped us get to this point. We will never forget that.”
Cocktail hour began with a jazz band, Italian bites, and Aperol Spritzes. “We were suddenly so happy with the decision to invite people to wear black tie to the wedding,” Audrey says. “We can’t take the credit for it, our wedding planners at Lynden Lane convinced us. It made us a little nervous beforehand—will people make the effort?—but once we were actually there, it felt like these ancient flake walls, stone terraces, and classical columns demanded it. All our friends and family looked like stars in a movie.”
For dinner, everyone was led through a stone archway to a courtyard, where impossibly long tables were lined with candles and sat under romantic string lighting. The Husseys made their entrance to “Moon River” by Henry Mancini which flowed into their first dance. After a delicious meal and heartwarming speeches, Matthew asked everyone to make their way to the pool, where dessert and a deejay waited.
The after-party kicked off with specialty cocktails, gelato, and pizzas served promptly at midnight. “One of the most important things to us was to keep people well fed the entire time,” Audrey shares. “Matthew gets food anxiety in life, and it translated to food being pretty much ever present throughout our wedding. Since no one had to go in search of food, the dance floor stayed full the whole night.”
“A highlight for us was when our DJ played The White Lotus theme song as a tribute to us being in Sicily,” Audrey laughs. “We didn’t ask him to, but it was such a silly and ironic moment that we all loved.” It was also a conscious decision to have a hard stop to the night at 1:00 a.m. to leave everyone on a high. The moment the last song ended, guests were escorted to a shuttle bus that took them back to the nearby town of Noto where they were all staying.
For their honeymoon, Audrey and Matthew headed off to Japan. “We haven’t taken a proper holiday in such a long time, and we wanted to feel far from home,” she says. “Matthew is also obsessed with the food culture in Japan, so after subjecting ourselves to a pretty boring health regime for a couple of months before the wedding, we felt we had only two jobs left: relax and eat.”
