How one design-crazy couple married their styles for a dream wedding

When a product designer who moonlights as a chef ties the knot with an art director who moonlights as a flower connoisseur, you can bet the wedding will be an absolute feast for the senses. And that rings especially true for Anurag Arora and Jayati Jain’s two-day nuptials held at The Riverview Retreat at Jim Corbett National Park in February this year.

Through the haldi, the soulful ghazal night, the garden wedding and the big after-party, the flowers and the food remained main characters. After all, that’s what lit the match that sparked the couple’s romance all those years ago. Back in 2019, tip-toeing around his career as a chef, Arora hosted a pop-up dinner on his Bengaluru terrace. Jain, whom he knew from their time together as students at National Institute of Design, offered to design the space, transforming it into a dining experience well before that phrase became the overused culinary term it is today.

Six years later, the couple set up two of the city’s most sought-after at-home pop-ups: Fried Chicken & Flowers, followed by Apartment. Getting your hands on tickets for either is an Olympic sport of its own brand. Somewhere along the way, creative wires crisscrossed, taking them from collaborators who are ‘just friends’ to inseparable romantic partners.

In April 2024, when Arora decided to propose to Jain, he returned to the pop-ups that brought them together. “I recreated an elevated version of the first meal I ever cooked for Jeju [Jayati] at home,” he says. What was once a cherry tomato and burrata salad was whipped into a cocktail reminiscent of those flavours. A humble oven pizza graduated to a hand-kneaded pastry baked in a wood-fire setup. “The idea was to signify the growth I have had because of her. I gave her a letter expressing my feelings and made a presentation that ended with an illustration of a ring asking her to marry me,” says the chef-designer, adding that he was afraid of getting the ring size wrong and thus settled for a visual cue instead.

Thus began the nearly year-long journey to bring together their wedding, a year filled with carefully designed moodboards and chaotic Pinterest dumps. “I was very clear that I wanted a venue with a mountain and a river in the background,” Jain says. That meant a series of mini holidays doing recce trips across Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand before settling on Corbett for their venue. When they imagined their wedding, words like ‘vacation’, ‘party’, and ‘true-blue Punjabi experience’ kept surfacing, and that’s exactly what they tried to put together. “A lot of times, couples aren’t able to enjoy their own wedding, and we didn’t want that to happen. Some of our favourite memories involve sitting down with our friends in the morning—no outfits, no makeup, just laughing while having breakfast together,” explains Arora.

To begin with, the groom was looking to bring a slice of nostalgia. “We gifted all our guests a box of atta biscuits made by the same baker that I grew up eating in Moga [in Punjab],” Arora shares. There was one more non-negotiable. “I always wanted pain au chocolat at my wedding. Not just any, but great ones,” he adds. So, the couple sweet-talked Blue Tokai and Suchali’s Artisan Bakehouse to set up a stall of treats and sips at their morning wedding, making it a picnic like no other. “Another highlight was the resort’s chai stall. Imagine a guy standing and making fresh tea with mountains in the background. It was too good to be true.”

Even their ghazal evening was planned with a specific mood in mind. The couple saw Devenderpal Singh perform at NMACC, Mumbai, a few months before the wedding and decided to have him sing at their event to recreate that soulful, magical spirit for their guests. Similarly, the after-party was crafted to be a no-holds-barred rager, carefully slotted after the wedding to free the bride and groom of all responsibilities. “We picked our outfits to be practical so we could have the most fun. Anurag got a coat from Cord Studio and I wore a more modern Raw Mango sari that was pinned so it stayed in place even when I jumped around,” Jain says. (She paired her sari with dance-floor-friendly leather shoes.)

For the wedding day itself, the bride had her heart set on a traditional Punjabi lehenga in peach. After ransacking designer stores, she traced her Pinterest reference image to Chandigarh-based Label Pearl Sekhon, took a day trip to visit the store, and sealed the deal. Arora, meanwhile, was averse to beige and bling and picked a grey sherwani with subtle threadwork from Philocaly. Eventually, the bloom-loving bride walked down the aisle holding a bouquet of rare tulips in hand. The mandap featured a flurry of sunflowers, daisies, roses, and hydrangeas. “I wanted it to look like a picnic in a wild forest," says Jain. “We had white umbrellas for people to carry around and tiny flower baskets for guests to shower petals when the puja was happening. The idea was for the decor to always enhance the mountains in the back.”

While Arora and Jain wax poetic about all the fun they had at their wedding, it didn’t come without effort. The first gigantic task at hand was creating their save-the-date, art-directed by the couple and photographed by their friend Jagadeesh Rao. Mind you, the moment this e-vite comes up in conversation, both Arora and Jain sit up a little straighter, bursting with excitement to revisit their process.

“The starting point for the theme was a circus,” Arora beams. “We rented a 10-metre-long blue tent and lugged it in an autorickshaw to the photography studio so we could take a picture in front of it.” The bride-to-be wore a corseted red blouse, a giant scrunchie, and funky heart socks. The groom-to-be chose a chocolate-brown suit, chunky Oxford shoes, and a bouquet of flowers. The sparkly, ruffled circus tent was their backdrop: now there’s a visual for decades.

This was just the beginning; there was also a physical invite. “We wanted it to feel like a celebration, a party, right from the start. So, when people open the envelope, a shower of confetti pours out,” Arora adds. A burst of colour in Brat green, rangoli pink, shades of blue and red, and the careful asymmetry and flurry of fonts instantly betray that the invite belonged to two creatives. Designed by Ayushi Jain, Anjali Mehta, and Arora, the card also bore an illustration of two tigers having a tea party. Turns out, evening chai is a shared ritual of love for the couple.

As expected, the self-proclaimed overthinkers paid too much attention to the details, so much so that the physical invite didn’t make it to half the guests in time. “Sometimes our friends come over for dinner and we give them the card then, as a memory,” Jain laughs. Perhaps that’s the big takeaway when two creatives get married: it will look and taste like a party, but the invite may only reach you long after the wedding is done and dusted.

Wedding design and execution by Studio Trellis