A Community-Centered Wedding Weekend at a Puglian Masseria
This wedding was designed as a four-day experience in Puglia built around one core priority: keeping everyone together. After more than ten years together, the couple wanted to gather the most important people in their lives for a long weekend that felt more like a shared holiday than a traditional wedding. Instead of one main event, they created a sequence of casual, meaningful moments that helped guests connect, relax, and settle into the landscape.
Photos by: kreativ weddings
THE FOUNDATION
Location: Villa Cenci Masseria, Puglia, Italy
Guests: 85 close friends and family
Duration: Four days
Guiding Intention
“To bring their entire community together in one place for a relaxed, connected, and joy-filled weekend that felt like a group vacation in Puglia, where everyone could share meals, make memories, and be part of the full experience from start to finish.”
Design Pillars
These pillars are guiding principles for designing weddings that move people: emotionally, sensorially, and relationally. Each one represents a quality that shapes how an experience feels. Find the complete list of Design Pillars here.
Togetherness - Every activity and layout decision supported people staying together, meeting each other, and becoming part of one cohesive group
Ease - Simple flows, clear communication, and low-friction logistics allowed guests to settle in quickly and stay present throughout the weekend
Presence - The food, landscape, and atmosphere were designed to showcase Puglia and root guests in the region’s culture and pace
Generosity - Personal touches, small gestures, and thoughtful transitions made guests feel appreciated and helped the couple’s personality come through
Sensory Anchors
Apple and honey
Warm, vintage color palette
If you want to work together to build your own Experience Foundation for your wedding, click here:
THE EXPERIENCE
Anticipation / Building Excitement and setting the emotional tone leading up to the event
Target Emotions: Excitement, ease, inclusion
Leading up to the wedding guests received Save the Dates designed as a vintage Italian postcard of Puglia. The couple hand-wrote each one to the invitee, making the invitation personal, welcoming, and heartfelt. The invitation suite included detailed travel information and itinerary, showcasing the detail and intention that went into planning the weekend, and ensuring guests they were in for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Immersion / Creating the lived experience and emotional depth during the entire celebration
Event: Arrival and pre-wedding shared experiences
Target Emotions: Warmth, connection, belonging
It was integral to the couple that everyone stay together on one property, not only to maximize their time together with folks traveling for afar, but to simplify the guest experience, so that once they arrived guests didn’t have to worry about logistics, transportation, or navigating an unfamiliar place. This also meant community could form naturally. People saw each other at breakfast, joined the bike tour through the countryside, shared wine at the vineyard tasting, and lingered around long tables late into the night. The design removed as many barriers as possible, so no one was ever wondering where to go, who to sit with, or whether they were included. The couple was onsite to personally welcome every single guest as they arrived.
Because they wanted their wedding weekend to feel like a shared vacation, they planned several experiences for the two days leading up to the wedding, including a bike tour of the countryside, a wine tasting, and a traditional Italian barbeque. By the time the wedding happened, everyone felt like old friends.
Guests were welcomed to their rooms with lovingly assembled gift bags, printed with the same image as the Save the Date postcard, filled with local snack, bottles of Aperol spritz with locally-sourced hand-crafted bottle openers, and provisions for the next few days to make their stay as comfortable as possible.
Event: Wedding
Target Emotions: Presence, togetherness, joy, emotional resonance
The wedding day fell on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. During this holiday, it is customary to dip apple slices in honey and eat them to symbolize the hope for a sweet and prosperous new year, so to incorporate this tradition into their wedding, they handed out sliced apples and honey to each guest as they arrived at the ceremony along with a small envelope with their name on it, which they were asked to hold onto. During the ceremony, the bride’s father who was officiating invited every guest to dip their apples in the honey and eat them as he gave a blessing for a good and sweet year ahead. He then invited each guest to open their envelopes. Inside were personal, hand-written notes from the couple letting each person know the role they played in their life and their marriage, the ways they were inspired by them, and their gratitude for their presence. It was an incredibly moving moment where every guest, individually and collectively. felt deeply appreciated, loved, and seen.
The groom is a musician and the music was a very important part of the wedding to the couple, and they brought in an incredible band from Rome that turned the evening into an epic party. Instead of doing a first dance, or a receiving line, the couple did a soul train, where the couple, the family, and the wedding party danced down the line of guests. It was fun, energetic, and unforgettable.
Event: Pool Party
Target Emotions: Ease, playfulness, closeness
The weekend ended with an all-day pool party that felt less like an “after-event” and more like the natural, joyful closing chapter of a trip taken together.
Reflection / Creating lasting memories and extending the emotional resonance beyond the event
Target Emotions: Nostalgia, gratitude, satisfaction
A few weeks after the wedding the couple invited guests to share their favorite memory from the weekend to a shared webpage, where everyone could see and comment on each other’s memories. It didn’t require heavy participation, but it created one final moment of communal connection and closed the experience loop with intention. The couple also sent printed photos of each guest from their professional photographer along with their thank you cards, further deepening the memory-making and nostalgia, and providing a lasting keepsake.
Conclusion
This weekend worked because every decision was made with the guest experience at the center, creating a celebration where people could relax, connect, and feel truly part of the story. Experience design transformed the wedding from a single event into a shared journey that brought the couple’s community closer than they ever expected.
