Casey Silverman and Noah Weiss
May 30, 2010

It all started with a dress.

Casey Silverman saw the frothy, strapless Carolina Herrera confection before Noah Weiss had proposed. And after the couple were engaged, the dress that had just happened to catch her eye months earlier became the inspiration behind her no-expenses-spared modern, romantic wedding. “The hand-painted gown was so specific, it really started the vision,” says Sara Fay Egan of Todd Event Design Creative Services, which gave Casey a completely custom event at the Ritz-Carlton, Dallas.

The bride and groom met about six years ago, when both were undergrads at Emory University in Atlanta. Casey calls it “a funny coincidence” when she tells the story of how she finally went out with the man she first thought was too Palm Beach perfect. For more than a year she’d been urged by the son of a family friend she’d met while on vacation in Idaho to meet his pal Noah. The men were buddies from Florida, and the friend thought Casey and Noah would be a good match. But it wasn’t until their sophomore year that they had a lunch date and hit it off.

After graduating from college in 2007, they dated long distance for a couple of years (he was working in Tampa; she first worked in Atlanta and then returned home to Dallas and began taking graduate classes). A few days before their four-year anniversary, Noah flew to Dallas and proposed catching Casey completely by surprise. “It wasn’t even on my radar,” she says. “I had zero, zero, zero idea that he was going to propose. We were living apart. My family was out of town. … All of a sudden he gets on one knee, and I said, ‘Ha, ha. That’s not funny.’ And then he pulled the ring out of his pocket, and I almost threw up.”

The lady kept it together, fortunately, and the wedding was planned for May 30, 2010.

The petite 26-year-old brunette loves fashion and design. She knew she wanted an all-white wedding that blended classic and contemporary elements, and she enlisted Todd Event Design Creative Services to make it happen.

Playing off the dress, which was originally created for Carolina Herrera’s bridal director’s daughter, Sara Fay and team translated a graphic, modern vision into a soft, romantic reality. “Modern parties can be severe, but this was not,” she says. Yes, there were a lot of clean lines, but there were also more than 14,000 flowers from half a dozen countries—some of them not often found at high-end weddings.

The chuppah, for example, was a giant cloud of baby’s breath held up by white birch branches (the tallit was Noah’s great-grandfather’s). After the ceremony, it served as a dreamy canopy over the cake, a three-tiered dessert of white sugar carnations. White carnations also hung at various heights in glass vials over the head table, looking like so many happy dancers.

Todd Events had plush, white carpet laid in the Ritz-Carlton’s reception area and ballroom. “It completely changed the look of the hotel,” Sara Fay says. “You didn’t know you were in the Ritz.” (At the end of the evening, the carpet was ripped up and donated to charity.) To further transform the space, the wedding designers built floor-to-ceiling muslin wall panels with architectural elements and custom-ordered a graphic fabric that matched the wedding invitation liner to slipcover some of the furniture, which also included Philippe Starck Ghost chairs and white leather Barcelona chairs and stools. To create intimacy, they hung 7-foot-long tissue paper chandeliers throughout the lofty ballroom space.

There were three styles of tables for the seated dinner for 350 guests—round, square, and banquette—each with different eye-popping linens and floral centerpieces. Casey’s favorite tables were accented with long, rectangular Lucite boxes filled with white peonies, low enough for people to talk but stunningly modern and fresh,” she says.

Just like the bride herself.

From the Spring/Summer 2011 issue