Romantic fall barn wedding at Stemple Creek Ranch

Categorized | Barn, California, fall, ranch wedding, Real Weddings

Posted on 06 January 2020.

Any newly engaged Cakies planning a fall wedding in 2020? Carrie and Dane’s romantic nuptials at Stemple Creek Ranch are just so timeless, you’re sure to reference them again and again over the coming months. The team at Prim Event Studio helped them incorporate so many pretty trends like vibrant earthy colors and warm lighting into a design that will never go out of style—check out the images Olivia Marshall Photography shared to see what we mean…

Love the subtle fall tones in these bouquets and bouts’ by Natasha Kolenko.

Carrie explains, We’ve been reading 100 Layer Cake and a few other blogs ever since we got engaged. The biggest takeaway for us was seeing how cohesive the featured weddings were. It definitely influenced our decision to hire a planner to help bring all of our vendors together on the theme of our wedding.

An organic fall color palette: caramel, amber, hunter green, and burgundy

We wanted our wedding to feel cozy, relaxed and comfortable, so it was important to us to add in personal touches and traditions. A couple examples: during our ceremony we put together a time capsule—we had a wooden box engraved with our names and wedding date, we put notes from our five and a half years together in there along with a bottle of wine from the year we met (2014). At our ceremony, we sealed the time capsule in front of our guests and now each year on our anniversary, we will reopen it, read through the notes, drink the wine and replace it with more wine and memories. At our wedding ceremony, we also did a wine toast to “seal our vows”, so after we surprised each other with our personally written vows, we poured wine into two glasses and had the guests say “cheers!” as we drank the big sips of wine!

Cocktail napkins with “fun facts” are such a cute personal touch, don’t you think? One of theirs was “Dane and Carrie have visited over 29 wineries together.” (True story!)

When it came to finding a venue, they had lots of choices in their ideal sport of North Bay (preferably not too far from the San Francisco airport), but Stemple Creek Ranch in in Tomales had it all: flexibility with the timeline and vendors, accessibility, and of course, beauty. Carrie says, Katie Kraft, the venue manager, was extremely down to earth, always accessible for us to visit onsite, very flexible in terms of when we could show up to start setting things up and when things needed to be shut down, and she also helped with making sure the wedding ran smoothly. On top of all of that, the venue itself was perfect, with a giant barn featuring strung lights and a tall redwood tree that made for a beautiful ceremony spot.

BTW, how gorg is this seating chart in all their fall colors? Such a great way to welcome guests into the barn. Speaking of the barn…

Gasp. This reception is flawless, no? They had a mix of long tables and round ones, all adorned with loose, wild florals and foliage, and velvet linens.

Their “table numbers” were favorite cities they’d made memories in, and tables also had a framed photo of them during their time at the corresponding location.

C + D’s biggest piece of advice? Figure out what’s most important and rearrange the budget to reflect that. For example, opting for a smaller (but totally adorable) wedding cake left room for a photo booth, which they knew their 115 guests would absolutely love. And they did!