Originally, Laura "Loudie"'s dream was to host an intimate destination wedding in Terlingua: a quicksilver mining ghost town nestled in the rugged Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas, to which her family has long-running connections. It's a hauntingly beautiful place known as a stargazer's paradise, given its proximity to Big Bend National Park, a certified International Dark Sky Park. The only catch was that the single historic chapel in the area is...not currently a Catholic affiliate, and a Catholic ceremony was a must for Loudie's family. So we pivoted to the local St. Vincent De Paul, and Loudie planned a very fun reception night: in lieu of gathering at Terlingua's famous Starlight Theatre, guests would dine under the silver fractals of a disco ball at a different kind of star-studded landmark: Armando's Tex-Mex restaurant in Houston. Fabled for hosting celebrities from Billy Gibbons (of ZZ Top) to Lionel Richie to Prince (there's a wall of fame at the end of the bar). The rich, warm wood-and-red-velvet interior of the restaurant was such a far cry from the celestial greens and blues of Loudie's original visual inspirations that I ended up pitching two different sets of flowers for the evening: one for the church that would be entirely inspired by the starry skies and yucca-and-cactus desert ecosystems the Diaz family loved so much, and one for Armando's that would make everyone feel, as Loudie described it, "like a disco queen dropped into Mexico City for a night." We leaned into the red, and also incorporated Mexican street market fruits, bold tropical flowers, and hanging garlands that made the whole place feel like a festival. The disco dinner party was such a smash hit that when I went back for teardown at the end of the night, I arrived to find Loudie trying to talk the DJ into an extra paid hour of music. Nobody wanted to stop dancing.
