He was the hotshot sales director. She was the model turned curator. It was only a matter of time before Isabella Bornholt and Kean Hughes became Hauser & Wirth’s coolest couple, and yet the scene of the proposal was the very antithesis of the west London gallery scene they call home. Nestled deep in Switzerland’s Engadin valley, Kean popped the question backdropped by Alpine mountains with a rose gold Oscar Saurin ring, furnished with clusters of white sapphires (Isabella’s birth stone) and morganite (the symbol for love). Isabella skipped the whole way back to base.
With the dynamic art world calendar making demands on their time, finding a wedding date proved tricky, but once St James’s Church – the gothic Spanish Place institution where Isabella’s parents and grandparents had wed – offered up 17 May as an option, the save the dates were sent. The Colombia, a Grade II listed Victorian townhouse peeping over Hyde Park, was equidistant from Isabella’s family home in Marylebone and Kean’s Notting Hill address, making it a no-brainer as a reception venue loaded with meaning. “I was dead set on my caterers being The Gatherers, as they are the only cooks who seem to know how to make restaurant-quality food en masse, so a venue with an in-house caterer was not going to cut it,” adds the bride, whose chef mother made a raspberry ripple cake that the couple cut with a sword.
Finding the dress was a different story. “I hate shopping IRL, I buy pretty much everything online,” shares Isabella, who likes to sit with a concept and take her time to mull it over. “I needed to come up with a look, not just buy a dress.” In the end, the bride kicked off the Mount St. rehearsal dinner in a pink vintage couture Tomasz Starzewski gown from her mother’s wardrobe – which she had fawned over since she was a girl – styled with Prada stilettos. The ceremony dress, meanwhile, came via Vietnamese label Montsand, but Isabella put her own twist on the Grecian draped midi with some modern tweaks made by The Sewing Rooms. Her Jane Bourvis lace veil was fashioned into a Juliet cap, and punctuated with a pair of her mother’s pearl earrings, while her shoes were loaned Manolos (“my something borrowed and my something blue”), and her diamanté handbag was a last-minute purchase from River Island.
“I really wanted an over-the-top moment,” confesses Isabella of her third outfit change. “I think it’s hard to let go of the idea of a corset when choosing a bridal look, and I had a clear idea of what I wanted.” Independent corset maker Anni Kruus obliged with a Tudor-style bodice to match a fab frou-frou miniskirt from Tbilisi brand Rouvéll, and with that, the bride was satisfied that her trio of wedding outfits “all made sense together”.
After deciding that the “most zen” way to start their wedding day would be to stroll through Covent Garden in the sunshine, Isabella left Kean, who commissioned Drake’s to make him a suit in his signature navy, to eat fries with her maid of honour in a Kettner’s hotel suite. “I’m not obsessed with getting my hair and make-up done,” she says of choosing to do her own glam. “I think it stems from my modelling days – I’ve been in that chair enough in my life.” Her bridal beauty secrets? Charlotte Tilbury’s Flawless Filter foundation, a cheap hair crimper and the energy of her inner circle. “Once the other bridesmaids showed up my zen set-up got entirely disrupted, but all the laughter and chat made up for it.”
The celebration at The Colombia unfolded with flowing Laurent Perrier (“I’m a big champagne girlie, so that mattered to me”), beef Wellington (the couple’s signature Valentine’s Day dish) and free cigarettes (“last Paris Fashion Week, every party had them, and I thought it was so chic”). The couple skipped their first dance, because the dancefloor was already heaving, but Isabella later spun the decks as DJ “I Do”, and ultimately took the party back to Kettner’s for a debrief. “Lots of us didn’t want it to end,” remembers the bride. “I wish I could relive it, it was so, so, so wonderful.”
