Butter Yellow, But Make It Fall

There's a version of a wedding that's about the room. The flowers, the lighting, the table settings so considered they could be a magazine spread. Hannah and Henry's fall 2025 wedding at Deer Mountain Inn in the Catskills was not that version. It was the other kind, the rarer kind: a wedding about the people in it.

Keila Bottiglieri photographed both days on film and digital, right in that window when upstate New York is holding its breath before peak foliage. The trees hadn't fully turned yet. The light was gold without trying. The whole weekend had that quality.

The Night Before: Fire, Long Tables, and Heirloom Fire at Hotel Lilien

The rehearsal dinner was held at Hotel Lilien, a beautiful property nearby in upstate New York, with catering by Heirloom Fire. And Heirloom Fire didn't arrive with trays. They arrived with a whole open-fire cooking rig, whole animals suspended over flames in the afternoon sun, Catskills trees blazing orange and yellow behind them. The charcuterie spread alone, piled with antlers and foraged greens on what looked like it had been pulled from the forest floor, was its own event.

Long white tables were set on the lawn with potted herbs as centerpieces: mint, rosemary, thyme in terracotta. Simple, tactile, alive. As the evening went on and Heirloom Fire plated rows of dishes outdoors in the October light, something settled in. This was going to be a weekend about the experience of being together, not the performance of it.

Hotel Lilien gave it exactly the right bones: intimate, unhurried, genuinely beautiful without announcing itself. The kind of place that makes every conversation feel worth having.

Butter Yellow at Deer Mountain Inn

The wedding day at Deer Mountain Inn started with the bridesmaids in a mix of butter yellow and sage, laughing across the lawn while the flower girls in hydrangea crowns orbited the scene like they owned it. Ailish Floral's work was everywhere and never too much: loose butter yellow cosmos, ranunculus, and dahlias that looked more like they'd been gathered from a field than arranged. The bouquets threw dappled shadows across Hannah's gown in the afternoon light, and that shot of her, bouquet raised overhead, sun breaking right through the petals, laughing in every direction, says everything about the day.

Deer Mountain Inn is one of those upstate New York wedding venues that doesn't need to compete with the couple. The cedar shingle exterior, the latticed windows, the mature gardens, the way the Catskills light falls across the lawn in October: it does its job quietly and completely.

A Cake Like a Meadow. A Dance Floor That Did Not Stop.

The dessert by The Upstate Table was a long white sheet cake with dahlias and dill growing straight out of it, scattered with raspberries and slices of lemon. On film, under the tent's warm light, it looked like someone had cut a garden in half and placed it on green velvet.

By night, the tent was full of white paper lanterns and trailing greenery, and The Cool Rulers made sure nobody sat down. The dance floor shots on film have that particular grain and warmth that makes you feel the room: arms up, everyone pressed together, the kind of night that ends late and gets talked about for years.

Ten years from now, Hannah and Henry will look at these images and feel exactly where they were. That's what Keila was there to capture.