“We like to say we had our first date on the day we met,” explains the executive assistant Hadley Lyman of when she first crossed paths with digital marketing director Jared Graf. They were introduced by overlapping friend groups at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco and quickly hit it off. “We ended up walking and talking back to a house party and later ended up seeing more live music together,” she adds. “Jared then asked me to break away from the hubbub to grab a late dinner and drink across the street.”
Five years later, the couple was on a hiking trip in the Dolomites. After a long day of climbing, Jared proposed on a pre-dinner stroll outside of Rifugio Lavarella. “The whole place was straight out of The Sound of Music (one of my favorite movies),” Hadley says. “Lush, grassy, mountain streams, old farm huts, chime of cow bells—the whole thing.”
When they first started looking for their wedding venue, the couple admits the experience was a bit overwhelming. “We were open to getting married in so many different regions,” she says. “We explored all over upstate New York, especially in the Catskills, Hudson Valley, and even into the Berkshires in Massachusetts.” They ended up falling for the old whaling town of Hudson, which features amazing architecture and a great arts community. As for the actual venue, they discovered the Circa 1799 Barn just thirty minutes from Hudson that checked all of their boxes. “It was old and strikingly beautiful, infrequently used but hardwired to have a wedding amidst farmland, flat grounds, and the owner seemed really relaxed,” Hadley adds.
As for the aesthetic of their wedding, Hadley and Jared wanted to add their own personality into the wedding as much as possible. “I drew all the artwork for the save the dates, invitations, way finding signs, while Jared colored and did all the typesetting for them all in InDesign,” she explains. They hired Kate Arel of A Charmed Affair to help with the planning and early on established a color palette that they used as a guide for everything from flowers to invites to linens. “We added little details to the table settings like kitschy salt and pepper shakers we found on Etsy for each table. But we also made sure to keep things subtle so as to no clash with the food and barn, which were both big personalities.”
Hadley admits she had a difficult time finding a wedding dress. “I’m very picky and generally averse to spending a ton on clothing, so I was opting for something vintage” she shares. She ended up buying a long 60s cocktail dress with embroidered silk that she wore to the rehearsal dinner, and which she later found out was vintage Oscar de la Renta. As for her wedding look, Hadley eventually conceded to the idea of buying a new dress and bought a silk slip dress from The Row. For her accessories, she wore earrings from Au Rate, which she paired with a veil she found on Etsy and shoes from Maryam Nassir Zadeh.
As for Jared, he chose a black tuxedo from a Brooklyn company called Martin Greenfield, and paired it with a custom made shirt from Seymour’s in San Francisco, tie and cummerbund from Brooks Brothers, and shoes from Meermin, a brand based in Mallorca.
The couple hosted a Friday night welcome barbecue the day before the ceremony in the backyard of a house that rented for the weekend in Hudson. The following afternoon, friends and family gathered at the Circa 1799 Barn to witness Jared and Hadley’s wedding ceremony. The bride walked down the aisle with her mother and processed in to “As We Go Along” by the Monkees. Her uncle Daniel was in charge of officiating the ceremony. “He’s my dad’s brother, and since my dad died seven years ago, it was also important in that respect, to have a bit of him in the ceremony with us,” she explains.
Instead of going straight to dinner, Jared and Hadley decided to kick off their reception with their first dance—“You Ain’t Going Nowhere” by The Byrds—which then quickly escaped into a full-on dance party. Then came food catered by Lil Deb’s Oasis and giant jeroboams of wine. “Jared’s family is in the wine business, so there was a lot of good things flowing around,” says Hadley. Towards the end of dinner, friends and siblings gave toasts, which the bride describes as “everything you want toasts to be: teary, heartfelt, and very funny.” The two cut into a coconut vanilla cake by Gracie’s Luncheonette, which had been decorated by friends, and officially opened up the tiki bar by the dance floor, where DJ Effie took over with a mix of disco, funk, and psychedelic vinyl tunes. “Besides dancing, there was a bonfire out in the field, a rattan lounge in the barn, an old school vintage photo booth, and some of our favorite movies projected on a screen all night so that people could choose their own adventures,” Hadley adds.
For their honeymoon, the newlyweds jetted off to Europe, where they stopped by the Amalfi Coast, Sicily, Lipari, Bordeaux, and ended with two nights in Paris. “One the last day of our honeymoon, we had one of the best meals of our lives at a restaurant called Comice,” she says. “Serendipitously, not more than ten minutes into sitting down, the Byrds’ “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” came on, so we had a feeling we were in good hands.”
