A Fairy-Tale Wedding Amid the Kentucky Bluegrass

If it’s true that rain brings good luck to impending nuptials, then surely Will and Talley Pike are set for life. Because it didn’t just sprinkle the night of their June wedding in Kentucky. There was a deluge. The mother of the bride, Jane Scott Hodges, describes it aptly as “biblical rain.” “Friday night, the skies opened, and it poured and poured,” she says. “I called my brother immediately and dispatched him to Tractor Supply to buy every pair of rain boots they had. Everyone was bonded together. We knew we would marry Talley and Will come hell or high water.”

Footwear procured, the dramatic weather took an instant back seat to the showstopping ideas that the bride and her mom had dreamed up. After all, together they run Leontine Linens, the storied New Orleans company known for its bespoke monogrammed bedding, towels, and place settings. The wedding work had begun nearly a year and a half prior, following the couple’s storybook engagement in Ravello, Italy—which had required both a helicopter and a boat to pull off—with Talley and her mom feverishly designing ten separate monograms for both the linens and paper, a custom quatrefoil-inspired dance floor, lavender satin curtains to frame the entrance of the wedding tent, and a truly epic emblem for the cake (topped with Herend porcelain lovebirds, naturally).

All of those exacting details were a tribute to the legacy and quality of Leontine, which Jane Scott founded nearly thirty years ago when she was compiling her trousseau for her own wedding and discovered a gap in the traditional monogram industry. The decision to hold the ceremony and reception at Millers Run Farm, a private property in Georgetown, Kentucky, was also a nod to family history. Jane Scott and her husband, Philip, tied the knot there, and the locale is right down the road from the house where they relocated their family (including then eight-year-old Talley) from New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. “I spent the bulk of my childhood in Kentucky with donkeys and Pygmy goats and my horse, Irish,” Talley says. “My happiest memories are in Kentucky, and having the wedding at the farm just felt like us.” Jane Scott agrees that the full-circle homecoming provided a soulful backdrop. “The very best compliment we received came from a childhood friend of mine who said, ‘The wedding felt like a big hug.’ That’s exactly what we were after. Something warm, personal, and welcoming.”

Months before the wedding, Talley and Jane Scott enlisted their neighbor and family friend, the landscape designer Jon Carloftis, to bring the farmhouse grounds into peak form. He even hosted a Thursday-night welcome party at his personal house, Botherum. The next day, after a bridal luncheon at the home of friend and interior designer Dottie Maloney (and a morning skeet shoot for Will and his groomsmen), the rehearsal dinner took place at the Apiary in downtown Lexington, amid lush gardens also designed by Carloftis. In a spur-of-the-moment decision, Carloftis even chauffeured the couple into the reception in his 1941 Packard. “Right after the wedding, while Talley and Will were freshening up, someone ran up and asked if I could drive them up to the tent,” he recalls. “I obliged, and it was just icing on the wedding cake.” Meanwhile, Melody Walker Rogers, of Refined Social Events, and her team worked behind the scenes (and against the rain) to put every idea into action, from orchestrating the stunning floral arch, to procuring benches from Keeneland racetrack for the ceremony (Jane Scott had used them for her wedding as well), to setting the entire reception scene hours earlier than planned on account of the impending rain.

The dress design began early, too—decades early. When Talley unearthed her paternal grandmother’s 1953 gown by Priscilla of Boston in her uncle’s attic, after nearly everyone in the family assumed it had been lost, she turned to Suzanne Perron St. Paul, the owner of the eponymous New Orleans atelier that created the dresses for her debutante season, to construct a modern riff on the vintage silhouette. St. Paul’s team removed the delicate pearl shells from the original and sewed them by hand onto Talley’s gown, alongside French lace from the historic importer Gelmor Lace. St. Paul and her team also made Talley’s going-away ensemble, a satin confection complete with a “P” appliquéd on the detachable cape.

Toward the end of the evening, Talley changed into that final outfit, paired with footwear designed by her friend Lizzy Chesnut Bentley, of City Boots, inside the house. While the rain tumbled down and guests danced beneath a tent to the band Simply Irresistible, Talley’s friends covered her dress with a protective trash bag (head and arm holes included) and sent her back into the reception, unwrapping it all as soon as she was beyond the torrent to reveal the sartorial denouement. “That’s the image I’ll keep forever,” Jane Scott says. “My daughter, laughing in the downpour, utterly un-bothered, dancing toward her future.”

Then it was on to late-night shenanigans, including a pizza delivery from the local Domino’s (or “Daddy Doms,” as Talley calls her favorite chain). In the wee hours, before the couple headed out under a shower—this time one of rose petals—for their honeymoon in Africa, Talley remembers sitting at the head table, looking out at the crowd, and feeling a swirl of emotions. “I recognized that a wedding is a milestone and a culmination of youth,” she says. “Recognizing all the people who showed up, who had walked with us in different seasons of life, I was filled with so much gratitude and love.”

Credits

Floral and event designers and wedding planner: Refined Social Events

Rehearsal dinner venue: The Apiary

Ceremony and reception venue: Millers Run Farm

Catering and bar: Dupree Catering + Events

Photography: The Browns

Hair: Casie Caillouet

Makeup: Lauren LaBarba

Ceremony musicians: Highland Chamber Players

Band: Simply Irresistible

Rentals: All Occasions Event Rental

Furniture rentals and custom fabricated pieces: Canvas Event Furniture

Cocktail napkins and specialty linens: Leontine Linens

Cake: Cakes by Bebe

Transportation: Gold Shield Transportation

Wedding paper: Claudia Engle Lettering and Design

Custom map: Alex Schwenke

Jewelry: Bachendorf’s

Bride’s dresses: Suzanne Perron St. Designs