- Long Beach Lodge & a private cedar clearing
- Autumn
- 64
Elise grew up in Ucluelet and wanted the ceremony to belong to the beach rather than sit on it. We read the tide tables for September before we read a single floor plan. The ceremony was set for 4:40 in the afternoon, forty minutes before low water, so the sand would be hard underfoot and wide enough for sixty-four chairs in two loose arcs.
Tom asked for nothing more than that his grandmother be warm. We built a small cedar pavilion at the forest edge, open on three sides, with wool blankets folded on every second chair and a brass brazier at the back. It became the place people gathered after the vows without being told to.
Florals came from a grower outside Port Alberni: sea holly, spent hydrangea, salal, and a very small number of garden roses in a colour the grower called tide line. Nothing was imported. The table ran the full length of the lodge's great room, one hundred and twelve feet, dressed in undyed linen with beeswax tapers and no centrepieces above eye level.
Dinner was cooked by the lodge kitchen with a chef we brought from Victoria for a single course: Dungeness crab cooked in seawater on an open fire, carried up from the beach in enamel pans. The wine was from Cowichan. The rain arrived at 9:15, exactly when the forecast said it would, and the doors were already closed.
The last guests walked back to their rooms along a path we had lit with two hundred hurricane lamps. The lamps were collected by 7 the next morning and the beach was left as we found it.
Details
- Full Planning & Design
