This Artist Couple Hand-Made Their Azores Wedding, Butter Shoes and All

Inês and Rodrigo had been married for five years before they threw the wedding. In Portugal, the fifth anniversary is Bodas de Madeira, the wooden anniversary, and the Brooklyn-based pair, she a Portuguese designer, he a visual artist, took it as their cue to bring their people to São Miguel, the Azorean island where Inês grew up, for three days they designed almost entirely themselves.

Paulo Goulart photographed the weekend, with Catarina Vidoeira as second shooter: a Friday welcome dinner on the north shore, a Saturday ceremony on the Sete Cidades lagoon, and a reception at Casa Grande, the manor in Sete Cidades the couple turned into an installation. The acrylic flowers they designed together in Brooklyn and carried over in their suitcases. The linens, the hundred hand-drawn seating portraits, the motifs in her hair: Rodrigo made those.

The Welcome Dinner

The welcome dinner was 30 friends at the Santa Barbara Eco Beach Resort on the island’s north shore, after a week of rain that cleared, right on schedule, into what the couple called “a sun-drenched coastal sunset.” Guests were asked to dress entirely in white, “acting as a blank canvas” for the two of them, and the two of them came as paper and pencil.

Rodrigo’s overshirt is from KidSuper Studios, embroidered all over with handwriting. Inês started with an ASOS dress and rebuilt it, trading the buttons for oddly shaped ones she sourced in New York’s garment district, then added notebook and pencil jewelry.

Casa Grande, Dressed Before Anyone Arrived

This is the house they would walk toward on Saturday afternoon, after the vows. The facade got a long cobalt curtain running from the main balcony to the ground, giant hands and flowers, realistic rock sculptures by Softrock, and a massive outdoor chess set on the lawn. The blue is doing the historic job here: São Miguel’s traditional ceramics are white and cobalt, and against a whitewashed house with basalt trim the curtain reads as the island’s own palette scaled up to the size of the building. The same blue comes back on the dinner linens, where the reference is spelled out.

Inês’s hands carried two of the smaller details. The dragonfly ring is from Kalliope, a Greek jewelry studio, chosen, in the couple’s words, as a marker of “this profound transformation.” The manicure is a one-of-a-kind lime green ombré by Lisbon’s Cult Beauty Bureau, matched to the green of the lagoon.

The Ceremony at Sete Cidades

The ceremony was at Casa dos Barcos, the boat house on the Sete Cidades lagoon, and there was no aisle. Instead of Rodrigo waiting at the front while Inês walked, the two of them appeared together at the boat house’s upper window and stayed there a while, looking down over the water, the string quartet, and their friends giving speeches on the grass below. Only then did they come down the stairs side by side and walk to the water’s edge for vows.

The window does something an aisle cannot: both of them get to watch the room before they are in it. The string quartet played their list, from Kendrick Lamar and Tom Jobim to Rosalía and Bad Bunny.

Inês also played. She joined the quartet on violin for Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” in the full dress.

A Vietnamese Gown and a New York Skirt

Inês and Rodrigo conceived the ceremony look as “a deconstructed moving lily,” and it was built in three layers. The base is a Lecia Bridal gown from Vietnam, a clean column with an open back. Over it sits a custom sculptural skirt from Bad Binch TONGTONG in New York, curved panels that rise off the shoulder and sweep along the grass like petals. The last layer is Rodrigo’s: the thin dark lines tracing every edge are his hand-drawn scribbles, rendered directly onto the silhouette, so the whole dress reads like one of his sketches come to life. Beside a lake where nothing else has a hard edge, it is the only sculpted thing in sight.

There was no bouquet. The flowers went into her hair instead, and the lily returned at her feet, in Cult Gaia’s Ria sandals with their sculpted calla lilies.

Rodrigo answered her with striped trousers, a Jacquemus jacket, and silver cufflinks shaped like tiny chairs, a very Rodrigo detail from the man who hand-drew a hundred seating portraits.

The flowers in her hair are Rodrigo’s. He drew São Miguel’s native flora on his iPad (hydrangeas, conteira, fern, and bird of paradise), had the drawings printed, and then, as the couple put it, “literally tattooed” them into Inês’s hair.

Portraits done, they walked toward Casa Grande and crossed paths with a local religious procession. They had chosen a non-religious ceremony on purpose, found the timing hilarious, and stopped to shoot it, “ironically securing a piece of traditional church pageantry in their wedding memories anyway.”

Dinner Under the Tent

Dinner was under a bedouin tent installed by the team from the Senhora da Rosa Hotel. There were no name cards. Each guest found their seat by finding their own face: 100 individual portraits, every one hand-drawn digitally by Rodrigo over six months. Inês and Rodrigo marked their own seats with custom shell glasses instead.

The linens are his too. He sketched food and drink motifs across white cloth with a cobalt blue marker, in the manner of the island’s traditional blue-and-white ceramics, and left the rest of the table minimal and open to the garden.

For another couple whose own artwork did the decorating, see this hand-painted wedding with pink leopards and bejeweled lilies.

The centerpieces are what the couple call the Acrylic Garden: designed in New York, packed in pieces into their luggage, and reassembled on site. The clear bases are cut in the shapes of the islands of the archipelago, the stems carry acrylic flowers, and the bases also hold custom candles molded as fruit and vegetables. The brief, in their words, was “a perfect balance of the lasting and the fleeting.” The candles melted down over the night, the wood tables stayed protected underneath, and the garden was still standing at the end; guests took most of the flowers home with them.

And yes, those are butter sculptures modeled on both of their shoes! “We wanted a representation of us on the cheese and charcuterie table,” say Inês and Rodrigo, so they made themselves out of butter.

The food was by Espaço Quinta, a local caterer: a buffet of island fish and meat, salads, and a long grazing table of local cheeses and charcuterie. Plus those amazing pastry rings that guests could top up with caviar 💍🐟.

The cake from Amori Cakes wasn’t sweet at all. It was a savory smoked salmon cake topped with a whole variety of tomatoes, which keeps it in line with the rest of the table: produce where the sugar flowers would usually go.

The Last Look, and a Piñata in Place of a First Dance

For the party they changed one last time, Inês into Kate Spade heels built from champagne corks, Rodrigo into a sleeveless black Uniqlo shirt, and led everyone to a renovated stable lit by a giant illuminated Big Apple, their adopted city standing in as a lighthouse.

In place of a first dance, Rodrigo blindfolded Inês and pointed her at a boat-shaped piñata, custom made by their New York friend Ana Magalhães of Piñata Colada and filled with chocolate coins, mint dollars, and gummy burgers and pizza slices: “a playful celebration of their green card chapter and their unforgettable trans-Atlantic love story.” The party went until 5 a.m.

Sunday morning everyone met back at the water for a group kayak, and the island’s weather returned on cue. The sun from the day before was gone and fog sat over the lagoon, which gave the guests, paddling through it, a second version of the place where the vows had been.

Five years in, they finally threw the wedding, and it was made of paper and pencil, acrylic flowers, butter shoes, and one boat-shaped piñata. Congratulations, Inês and Rodrigo! All the best from GWS.