An Intimate Wedding at Quinta de Los Leones: Kendel & Thibaut

Some weddings are measured by how many people fill the room. This one was measured by how close everyone stood to the couple.

Kendel and Thibaut married on a brick terrace above the water at Quinta de Los Leones, a villa built in the architecture Puerto Vallarta is known for — whitewashed walls, red clay tile, wrought iron, and cobblestone that climbs the hillside toward the bay. There were only a handful of guests. Their chairs were set in a loose circle rather than in rows, so that no one watched from a distance. Everyone was in the ceremony, not just near it.

I love designing for a day like this. When the guest list is small, the flowers stop being decoration seen from afar and become something you live inside for a few hours. Every stem is close enough to touch. That changes how I work.

I designed the flowers for the day myself, built around Kendel's own vision for it — an easy collaboration, the kind that happens when a bride knows the feeling she is after and trusts you to bring it into bloom.

Flowers that framed the sea, not blocked it

Instead of a traditional arch, I built two asymmetric floral columns to frame the couple — one taller, one lower — so the horizon and the palms stayed part of the ceremony. The palette was white and green, gathered the way a garden grows rather than arranged into a shape: white ranunculus, garden roses, hydrangea, spires of bells of Ireland and delphinium, freesia, and plenty of fern and palm to keep everything loose and moving in the ocean air.

I leave negative space on purpose. A column that is too dense reads as a wall; one with air in it feels alive, and it lets the setting breathe through. Low meadow arrangements lined the aisle and gathered at the ends of the chairs, so the flowers met the guests at the ground as well as at eye level.

Candlelight in the courtyard

As the light dropped, dinner moved into an interior courtyard — stone walls, a carved fountain, and string lights strung through the trees. One long table, dressed in natural linen, sat at the center.

For the table I kept the arrangements low and let candlelight do the rest. The centerpieces lived in white footed compotes — a piece I come back to again and again — filled with the same white and green from the ceremony, with a few tropical notes woven through: heliconia, green pods, garden textures that belong to this coast. Pillar candles in glass carried the rest of the glow down the table. Nothing tall, nothing that came between two people sitting across from each other.

Puerto Vallarta, quietly

Later, Kendel and Thibaut slipped down the cobblestone lanes below the villa for portraits — stone walls, a balcony spilling bougainvillea, the town going gold at the end of the day. It is the Puerto Vallarta I get to design in all the time, and it never stops being beautiful: a place that already has so much character that my job is mostly to work with restraint and let it lead.

Why intimate weddings work

An intimate wedding is not a smaller version of a big one. It is a different kind of day. With fewer guests, the budget and the attention move from scale to detail — better flowers, real candlelight, a table where everyone can hear each other, a ceremony held close enough that every face is part of it. Nobody is performing for a crowd. The couple is simply present, with the people who matter most, in a setting that does half the work.

If you are planning something like this in Puerto Vallarta, Punta Mita, or the Riviera Nayarit, this is exactly the kind of wedding I love to design — full-day, one couple at a time, built around the place and the two people at the center of it.

Vendor credits

• Couple: Kendel & Thibaut

• Photography: EagerHearts Photo — @eagerheartsphoto

• Venue: Quinta de Los Leones, Puerto Vallarta

• Floral design: Flowers by JJ — @flowersbyjj designed with the bride's vision