Villa Valentini Bonaparte Wedding Stationery

We die cut the card to the shape of the label. It is letterpress printed in pale blue, then hung with a navy silk tassel through a hand set eyelet. At its centre sits the couple’s crest. Two lions hold a shield with the SB monogram beneath a crown. We drew it for this wedding and have used it on nothing else.

It arrives inside a pocket rather than a plain envelope. We printed the pocket with a toile built from Italian landscape scenes. Then we blind debossed it with an ornament taken from an Italian stone carving. So the surface carries pattern in colour and pattern in relief at once. An oval aperture cuts through the front, and the printed card shows through it before anything is opened.

We die cut the outer envelope along the flap, because a straight flap would have looked plain against everything else. Inside, the liner is painted by hand from one of the frescoes in the villa. It shows grotesque ornament in blush and pale blue, with urns, scrollwork and trailing vines. A white wax seal with a gold monogram closes it. We wrote every address in calligraphy, then posted them under vintage American stamps.

Savannah asked for handmade paper. That changes how a suite has to be drawn, because cotton fibre spreads fine detail. So we redrew the ornament with more open line and heavier weight. The version that worked on the smooth save the date would not have survived the press.

We letterpress printed the invitation, the details card and the reply card on handmade paper with deckled edges. A hand drawn line illustration of the villa sits at the head of the invitation, printed in the same dusty rose as the wording. The details card runs in pale blue on a lighter sheet. It sets out the whole weekend. Welcome dinner on the Monday, the wedding on the Tuesday, a tour of Cortona on the Wednesday, each with its own dress code.

Around all of it goes a printed vellum wrap. We took the artwork from an antique Tuscan landscape painting. So the suite opens through the countryside the couple asked their guests to travel to, all hills, cypresses and a hill town in the distance. A torn silk ribbon and an antique gold wax seal hold it closed.

We die cut the outer envelope and lined it with a painted floral. Then we addressed every one by hand in calligraphy. Guests in the United States received them under vintage postage, chosen stamp by stamp rather than bought as a sheet.

Villa Valentini Bonaparte stands on a ridge outside Cortona. It looks across the Val di Chiana towards Umbria. The facade is pink stucco with deep green shutters and an armorial crest set into the tower. Twin curved staircases in wrought iron sweep down to a box parterre. Cypresses and umbrella pines close the view on both sides.

Inside, the register changes. Drawing rooms run in pink and pale blue, with plasterwork picked out in gold. There is painted panelling, parquet laid in herringbone, gilt overmantel mirrors and vitrines of porcelain. This is Italian rococo, not the austere Tuscan stone most couples expect. In feeling it sits far closer to a French chateau than to a farmhouse.

For stationery that is a gift rather than a constraint, because the villa supplies its own source material. The frescoes gave us the envelope liner. The plasterwork gave us the weight of the ornament. Then the landscape beyond the parterre gave us the vellum wrap. We invented almost nothing here. We drew it from what is already there.

Guests had flown to Italy for three days. So the first thing they met at the villa was a cotton tote, printed with a hand drawn illustration of the house. Cypresses stand either side, with the name and the year set beneath. That drawing shows the same building as the invitation. We redrew it larger and in more detail so it held at tote scale.

Inside each bag went a welcome booklet. It is a stack of cards held at the head by a ribbon through an eyelet, with the crest on the cover. Each day of the weekend gets its own card, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then Grazie. A monogrammed leather luggage tag went in alongside it. That is the one piece a guest could still be using years later.

The welcome note is digitally printed on handmade paper with a torn edge. Digital suits a long piece of writing better than letterpress does. The text runs to a full page, and fine type at that length reads more evenly on the surface than pressed into it. The couple wrote it themselves. It is also the first thing a guest reads in the room.

The ceremony was held outdoors in the gardens, so we printed a fan for every guest and laid one on each chair before they arrived. They are pleated paper on wooden sticks, printed across the full spread rather than on a single panel, so the design only resolves once the fan is opened.

The artwork is the cartouche again, blown up and elaborated. Scrollwork, cherubs holding the shield, trellis, urns and swags of flowers, printed in blush and dusty rose on pale blue with a run of floral sprigs along the top edge. At the centre sits the same crest that opened the save the date a year earlier.

Printing across pleats is not straightforward. The paper is folded after printing, so the artwork has to be set out flat with the fold lines allowed for, or the ornament breaks at every crease. It is the kind of detail nobody notices when it works and everybody notices when it does not.

The menu and the place card are one piece. We die cut each to the outline of the cartouche, then printed it in blush. The frame fills the whole card and the courses sit inside the oval. We then named each one in gold calligraphy across the centre. A silk ribbon runs through an eyelet at the head.

We made two versions, one on card and one on vellum. So the setting could take a solid piece or a translucent one, depending on where it sat. On the pale blue plates with gold flatware, the vellum reads almost like glass.

We wrote each name across the printed ornament rather than into a blank panel. That was deliberate. It puts the guest’s name on top of the design instead of inside a box left for it. Gold over blush also carries without needing a heavier hand.

The table numbers use the same die and the same frame. We printed them a little cleaner, then set them into gilt holders in the centre of each table. So a guest walking to their seat sees one shape repeated from the chair to the charger.

Instead of a seating chart, the couple built a wall. Three pale blue panels carry raised lettering, Savannah and Bennett on one side and Love Is In The Air on the other. Shelves run the whole way down, dressed with blush and peach florals.

A glass fragrance diffuser sat on the shelves for every guest. We tied a printed oval tag to each one with silk ribbon, carrying the crest, the guest’s name and their table. So finding your name and collecting your favour became the same action. Nobody queued twice, and nothing needed clearing away afterwards.

The reverse of each tag reads as a line from the couple rather than a label, a personalised fragrance to remember the day by. It is a small piece of writing. It is also the reason the tag gets kept rather than untied and dropped in a bin on the way out.

Savannah and Bennett married in the gardens beneath the stone gazebo. Peach and blush roses wrapped its columns and wrought iron dome, with white hydrangea, yellow carnations and trailing amaranthus. The aisle ran between banks of the same flowers. White iron chairs stood either side, each with a printed fan waiting on it, and the Val di Chiana opened out beyond the hedge.

The villa gives a couple three settings within a few steps of each other. The curved staircases on the front, the arched loggia beneath them, then the brick terrace running out to the parterre. Savannah wore a beaded lace bodice with long sleeves above a full satin skirt. Bennett wore a dusty rose suit, which answered the blush running through the stationery.

Dinner ran outdoors on the lawn below the terrace. Long tables in ivory linen faced a band and a dance floor at the far end, with festoon lights strung in bays across the whole garden. Blush and peach roses, ranunculus and delphinium ran the length of every table. Blush and grey tapers stood between them in gilt and ceramic sticks. The menus sat on the chargers, with a table number in the middle.

It was early April, so the light went while people were still eating. Then the moon came up over the Val di Chiana. The lights came on across the garden, and the hills behind the tables faded out into the dark.