Villa Pizzo Wedding Stationery

Villa Pizzo stands at Cernobbio on the western shore of Lake Como, a sixteenth century estate with terraced gardens climbing the hillside, a glasshouse on the water and a blush pink facade facing Bellagio across the lake. Guests arrive either by road through the gardens or by boat at the private dock.

For stationery the villa gives us two very different registers to work with. Outside there are clipped topiary, stone staircases, statuary and a soft chalky pink. Inside there is a black and white checkerboard marble floor, green marble skirting and rococo plasterwork. Design that suits it has to sit between the garden and the salon rather than commit to either, so we kept the papers soft and the ornament fine.

The ornamental iron gates at the entrance are the detail every photographer records and no stationery uses. We made them the shape of the invitation, and drew the villa itself as a venue illustration for the reply card.

The invitation opens through a pair of die cut gates. We drew them by hand from the ornamental ironwork at the entrance to Villa Pizzo, the same way we work on any venue illustration, printed them in powder blue with gold foil scrollwork, and closed them with a monogrammed wax seal.

Inside, rather than the invitation wording, we hand calligraphed a poem the couple had chosen, in soft blue ink across the spread. The wording waits on the card behind it.

The sequence is the whole idea. Closed, the invitation gives nothing away. Opening the gates is the same gesture as arriving at the villa, and what is behind them is the reason for the day rather than the details of it.

A wedding spread across a weekend has to carry more information than a single day, without the suite turning into a folder of paperwork. We split it, and gave each piece one job.

The invitation holds the ceremony and the dinner. The details card in powder green carries the timings and the practical information, headed in gold foil. The dress code card handles what guests should wear to each event, and we painted it rather than describing it, since white cocktail attire and black tie mean different things in different countries. The reply card is die cut to the shape of the villa, so even the piece that gets posted back is a keepsake.

We carried the same papers and processes onto the wedding day itself. Menus letterpress printed with gold foil headings and blind debossed florals, place cards die cut and written by hand in white ink on lilac, lace fans on every stone stool for an outdoor ceremony in September heat, and a pair of vow folios bound in linen with silk ribbon.

Because we had taken the palette from the florals a year earlier, the menus sitting on the chargers matched the lilac and blue running down the centre of the table without anything needing to be matched at the last minute. That is the advantage of designing the stationery alongside the wedding rather than after it.

The ceremony was held on the terrace at Villa Pizzo beneath a floral arch, with the lake and the mountains behind it and an aisle lined in blue hydrangea, lilac roses and delphinium. Dinner followed at the villa, and the evening ran on with performers dressed to match the gardens and the palette of the day.