Real Wedding of Eliza & Aaron

Black, white, and Uluwatu at dusk. Eliza and Aaron’s brief was simple, to appreciate the beauty of the venue and leave the traditional rulebook behind.

The couple knew they didn’t want a conventional wedding. No gift table, no wishing well, no format inherited from someone else’s idea of what the day should look like. Guests were asked only to show up and write a letter. Messages and wishes for when the ceremony had become a memory. Your presence, they said, is the present.

Aaron, who has always loved triangle architecture, walked into the chapel and knew immediately. Eliza, who had been proposed to in Japan and was drawn to Tirtha’s Japanese-inspired design, saw the white, the ocean, and the geometry and felt the same. They had also discovered that Christian Bautista had married there.

They also knew wedding trends shift. The wedding they designed together was never about decoration, only working with what felt natural: black against Tirtha’s clean white aesthetic, the chapel against the sky, and the Indian Ocean doing what it does best at golden hour.

Aaron is a planner. Early in their relationship he mapped it out plainly: ten years, she studies, he works, then a proposal. On their tenth anniversary, on Mount Fuji, he got down on one knee. The wedding itself took nearly as long to find its shape. They had originally planned a celebration in their homeland, the Philippines. Deposit paid, date locked in, but when the pandemic arrived, the money didn’t return, and the plan dissolved. Australia, where they are based, made financial sense. Aaron lobbied for a three-day bush wedding. Eliza listened, but secretly had Tirtha Uluwatu saved on her phone.

Aaron offered the most useful reframe: “You always aim for a perfect wedding, but what you forget is that it’s once in a lifetime. Focus on the beauty.”

And in the end, that beauty was everywhere.

White linen, black napkins, single-stem tulips in silver bud vases running the length of each table. Ghost chairs. A crystal chandelier suspended through billowing white ceiling drapes, fairy lights threaded through the folds. The glass walls opened to the garden beyond, lit softly against the night. Monochromatic, precise, and exactly what they had imagined.

Seventeen years together led them here: from a carefully mapped plan to a cliffside chapel in Bali, surrounded by love and beauty.

“We look back and feel proud of our journey and our wedding,” the couple said. “We wanted our kids to look back one day, maybe even visit Tirtha themselves, and still think it was beautiful.”