We love when clients walk in the door with a fun party concept that’s derived from cherished family memories. For Alexa’s Bat Mitzvah celebration, our inspiration came directly from our young client’s love of the Jersey Shore. Particularly, her love for carousels, ferris wheels and boardwalk arcades. With this fabulous collage of brightly-hued and vintage-toned beach scenes as inspiration, we managed to gather up plenty of playful ideas for her boardwalk birthday party.
{Awesome photos courtesy of Marie Labbancz, collage via Pinterest}
Although this family milestone event took place in a grand hotel ballroom, our design mission was clear from the start: create a festive boardwalk vibe with a rainbow of bright colors, vintage beach fabrics and seaside decorative props. We dove into the theme with relish and managed to place beachy touches all through the party spaces, from beach umbrellas and lifeguard stands on the food stations to fresh cut grasses, dune fencing and vintage ferris wheels. Alexa and her friends even had their own Boardwalk Arcade with a simulated roller coaster and a room of boardwalk games.
In keeping with the happy beach theme, we designed all the tablescapes with an assortment of festive outdoor fabrics and eclectic containers filled with imported flowers of the season. Weathered ceramic vine motif cachepots were combined with Lattice work urns, ceramic blue crackle vases, driftwood, apothecary jars, mercury glass, and hemp-wrapped vases. Blossoms such as Hydrangea, Garden Roses, Tulips, Delphinium, Nerine, Amaryllis, Hyacinth, Forsythia, Gerbera Daisies, Forget-Me-Not, Scabiosa, Ranunculus were used among others. In keeping with the seaside summer theme, flower colors were used in hues of blue, green, apricot, mango, melon, berry, plum, and lavender. Always important in setting the mood, the lighting went from sunny golds to sunset hues of amber pink before dimming to soft starlight blues. Really everything conveyed summertime fun, right down to the energetic and perfectly dressed orchestra, LA Stars, to the save the dates, invitations, cocktail napkins and signage designed by Two Paperdolls. Although it was October outside, trust us, it was all sizzling summer inside.
