Hacienda De La Flores Wedding
Hacienda De La Flores Wedding
Moraga, California
Hacienda De La Flores Wedding
Hayley & Colin’s Hacienda De La Flores Wedding in Moraga, California was timeless, stylish, and beautiful. We flew into the Bay Area to capture Hayley and Colin’s Rehearsal Dinner the day before the wedding. Capturing the Rehearsal Dinner is always a good idea because it gives us a chance to see the venue, be fully prepared for the ceremony, and see the bride and groom beforehand!
A Historical Moraga Wedding Venue
“The main patio of the Hacienda de las Flores was installed in 1985. The first story of the present building was built by Alberta Higgins and Gertrude Mallette. Donald Rheem purchased and enlarged the building in 1934. In 1977, the Town of Moraga acquired the present site and it is now the headquarters of the Moraga Parks & Recreation Department.” - read more here
Hacienda De La Flores by Wedgewood Weddings is a beautiful venue to get married at. The location is hidden and it kind of pops out of nowhere within the middle of a neighborhood. We loved the Spansion style architecture as well as the Parkland Gardens that are full of cedar, pines, willows, palms, flowers, and sparkling stone fountain.
Hacienda De La Flores Wedding Photos:
Words from the bride
How did you two meet?
Colin has a really close-knit group of friends from growing up (they have a text thread that still goes off daily all these years later) and some of those guys ended up going to college in San Luis Obispo with Hayley where they quickly became friends. Over the years, the two of us met and talked in passing, but it wasn't until a couple years after graduation that we started dating. It's funny to think back on the moment things changed between us because it took a night out with our, now, mutual friends and one of them saying to Hayley, "Rudy [Colin] thinks you're cute." That gentle nudge from a person we both trusted signaled it was okay for us to let our guards down with each other and see where this could lead.
How did the proposal go down?
It was Christmas Eve 2020 (so peak pandemic) and Colin and I were able to get home to California from New York to be home with our families for the holidays. It wasn't unusual for Colin to come over that day, so when he arrived and asked me what I wanted to do, with practically no other options at the time, I suggested a walk with our dog in the open space behind my parents' home—the same walk I had done countless times growing up. We headed out and a little ways in, I noticed something up ahead under a tree. As we got closer, I realized a picnic had been set up and quickly announced that I thought someone was getting surprised and hurried Colin to keep walking so we didn't blow it. Instead, he slowing backed into the space with his arm stretched towards me and a big, beaming Colin smile across his face. It's all a blur after that, but one of my favorite memories from that moment came after the proposal when an elderly couple sat down at the bench nearby and shared their decades-long love story with us. It felt like a blessing on our new life together.
What did you envision your wedding being prior to planning?
We were all over the place for several months. We knew we didn't want anything cookie-cutter which ruled out a lot of turnkey wedding venues. At the time, we lived in New York and had started spending long weekends upstate during the pandemic, so that was at the top of our list. We briefly tossed around the idea of an urban NYC wedding, thinking this may be our only opportunity to show a lot of our loved ones our life together in Brooklyn. But ultimately, we decided a celebration in the Bay Area, back where we met and grew up, made the most sense. We considered everything from wineries in Napa to a ranch in Mill Valley to our parents' backyards in the East Bay, but for one reason or another nothing was working out. By that point, we had settled into a self-described "eclectic backyard black tie" wedding inspired by Father of the Bride, so we wanted it to feel understated, classic and full of charm, but still fresh and different. When we found the Hacienda de las Flores tucked away in Moraga, there was a collective exhale amongst our immediate family members—we had finally found our place!
What unique elements or DIY details did you include?
When we booked our venue, it was managed through the city's parks department which meant that it was practically a blank slate with some basic rules that we had to work around. We ended up doing a lot ourselves...mostly by choice because it was important to us that our wedding feel super personal, but in hindsight it might have been a little too much given how stressful it ultimately became to manage everything. Hayley designed the wedding invitations using her aunt's handwriting, as well as the event programs which included a note from her grandma about meeting Colin back in 2014. Her parents are big time thrifters, so we leaned into that for a lot of the smaller details, like sourcing all of our napkins from flea markets/Etsy/ebay/Facebook Marketplace and finding all of our flower vases at Goodwill. Our friend's mom actually did all of our table floral, pulling inspiration from her garden and wildflowers in the area. Colin's dad digitized our old home movies and put together a silent video that played on a projector at our reception, showing us both as kids with several family members who are no longer with us. Our good friend baked our wedding cake and Hayley's mom made cookies using an old family recipe.
What was your favorite moment?
We loved the recessional that our planner and DJ organized on the spot. They asked all of our friends and family to grab a [flameless] candle from the dance floor and line up along the staircase outside the reception area to see us off. It was such a fun, unexpected ending to the night. (Although, immediately after that, we jumped on a party bus and headed to a dive bar, another favorite moment from the night.)
What is one piece of advice that you could give brides-to-be?
Don't try to do it all yourself. You need help. Hire a planner that you trust and try to hand everything off at least one week before (and take work off if you can) so that you can be really present in the days leading up to the wedding. The best advice I got was from a friend who had been recently married and she simply said, "Everything is the wedding." I kept this as a mantra in my head after I heard it as a reminder to cherish every moment—the nail appointment with my mom is the wedding, picking up my dress is the wedding, the last-minute trip to FedEx to print drink menus is the wedding, and so on. When you take time to appreciate the seemingly insignificant errands leading up to the big day, it makes everything feel fuller and last longer.
A couple extra short ones:
- Expect the unexpected. Our planner got COVID the week of our wedding, so instead of checking out like I recommend, we were onboarding a new planner the week of! Stress...
- Follow wedding accounts on Instagram for inspiration and listen to wedding podcasts to learn from other people's mistakes. Some personal favorites were @_anti_bride on Instagram and the Bridechilla podcast on Spotify.
- You better love your photographer and/or videographer because that is literally all you get to take with you from that day (other than each other). I'm so glad we invested in this even though it was an expensive pill to swallow at the time.
Check out these other Bay Area Weddings that we’ve captured:
Castello Di Amorosa Styled Wedding in Napa
Mission Ranch Hotel wedding in Carmel By-The-Sea