Vancouver Wedding Venue Terminal City Club | DreamGroup Productions

Heart of Gold

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Featured in: Featured Vol. 11, Iss. 1, No. 21 + By: Lauren Kramer + Photographed by: Josh Bowie

When Geneve McNally, principal planner at DreamGroup Productions, first received a call from bride-to-be Erin MacKinnon in November 2009, she could hear right away there wasn’t a waver of doubt in Erin’s voice. “She and Burke were hiring a planner for all the right reasons,” she reflects. “They knew they were too busy to take on the wedding organization themselves, but both wanted their wedding to be of a certain calibre. They hired me because they knew my work and trusted me, but they also knew what they wanted and were able to articulate it. That made the planning experience all the more fun.”

In many ways, Erin, 29, was a dream client: decisive, practical and with a great sense of humour. “I knew it was best to get experts involved when it came to planning my wedding,” says Erin, who married Burke Telfer, 27, in June 2010. “Having never planned a wedding before, I had no idea about all the logistics that would go into it.”

Erin is a marketing specialist at a gold mining company, while Burke owns a real estate investment firm. Each of them easily works 50-to-60 hours a week, and while they knew they wanted a romantic, classic, elegant event with a fun and inviting atmosphere, they had no idea how to create it from scratch. McNally was pregnant with her second child at the time but was nevertheless excited to take on the wedding planning.

As she got to know the couple, McNally learned that Burke and Erin had met through a mutual acquaintance at a Rod Stewart concert. Erin, learning Burke was looking for work, offered him a position as a contract promotional rep for her company. Within days their relationship deepened and became more serious, at which point Erin informed him they would no longer be working together. “I loved being his boss, because I got to spend time with him at work, but I much preferred being his girlfriend,” she says with a laugh.

A year later, as the couple was in Portugal at the tail end of a 12-month trip, Burke proposed at Peneda Geres, a spectacular national park, and Erin enthusiastically accepted. Back in Vancouver, after hiring McNally, they chose the Terminal City Club as their ceremony and reception venue. With its location in central downtown and its hotel on site, the Terminal City Club was a convenient and easy choice that made sense for in-town and out-of-town guests.

From the get-go, McNally knew she had to make a strong impression at the MacKinnon-Telfer wedding. “Erin’s mother Deb MacKinnon is a well-known artist and painter in Vancouver and Burke’s mother, Nancy, has organized a lot of charitable events for the BC Children’s Hospital,” she says. “Nancy could have planned the wedding but she didn’t have time. Still, she wanted her voice heard, and I wanted to make sure she was impressed. I knew she had high expectations and I had a lot to prove.”

Some brides are forced by budgetary restrictions to pinch their pennies,but for Erin and Burke’s wedding the budget was fairly generous. “They have good taste and high expectations, but they don’t throw their money away,” McNally says. “Making smart decisions was important to the couple but it didn’t come before creating a fabulous end result. Their priority was to do it right and have an impressive look.”

The look they wanted for their wedding was elegant and chic, full of playfulness and reflections of themselves, but also with a feel that was modern yet timeless. McNally says she was thrilled when Erin chose a colour scheme of peach, white and black to complement the heritage, classic feel of the club’s ballroom. “Initially she had talked about peach and orange, but after seeing the colours together in a palate, she changed her mind,” McNally says. “I was glad, because the peach and orange scheme didn’t have the clean, crisp, elegant look I’d envisioned.”

But of course the colour peach can mean different things to different people, as they all experienced at the first ‘showing’ with the florist. “The flower arrangement was more of a flesh-pink than a peach in tone,” McNally says. “After the showing we selected a larger, higher floral arrangement and I contacted the florists with a more specific shade of peach.”

The job of a good wedding planner is to lift stress and pressure from the shoulders of the bride, and McNally simply excelled at that, Erin says. “Geneve introduced me to fabulous vendors and was wonderfully organized, which meant I didn’t have to worry about anything,” she says. The two spoke daily on the telephone, and exchanged some 237 emails over the course of the seven months they worked together. “That’s actually less than usual,” McNally confides. “I’ve exchanged as many as 400 emails with brides over the course of a year of wedding planning.”

One of those vendors was Upright Décor, a company that helped McNally pull off an event that would be elegant, chic and full of playful touches, but not in the least ostentatious. While McNally honed in on the details, Erin and Burke enjoyed dance classes at Broadway Ballroom in preparation for the wedding reception.

As their June 12th wedding approached, McNally had the event fine-tuned with a schedule that defined what would occur every 15-to-30 minutes. Still, as she knows from years of experience there were surprises no-one could have predicted.

One was that the vintage car that was supposed to escort Erin and her father from West Vancouver to the Terminal City Club would break down before it got there. “We sat in a broken car on the Lion’s Gate Bridge until the driver told us we should probably get out,” Erin says with a laugh.

“So we stood on the side of the highway with people driving by and waving, asking us if we were doing a photo shoot. Then a nice little Toyota full of hikers pulled over and asked if we needed a ride,” she recalls. “My dad and I piled into the backseat and they whipped us downtown to the ceremony, me trying desperately not to let my dress touch the muddy hiking boots. It made for an amazing story at the wedding later that day, and we all got to laugh about it!”

The monogrammed aisle runner at the wedding reception, which was laid down just before the ceremony, was another example. “Nancy, Burke’s mother, had come upstairs with me to inspect the room before the ceremony, and just before she walked in I noticed that the monogram we’d ordered for the aisle runner had Burke’s name spelled wrong,” McNally groans. “I ripped it away just before she entered the room, then discretely trimmed the carpet back so no-one would see the misspelled name. Thankfully, when I later told Erin about it she thought it was hilarious.”

Every wedding planner wants their bride to feel like she spent her money well when she hired organizational help for her big day. Looking back on her wedding, Erin says hiring DreamGroup Productions was the best decision she made. Small fiascoes like the broken vintage car and the misspelled aisle runner did nothing to colour her impressions. What she does remember is McNally’s recommendation that she and Burke spend some time together before the wedding, to give their day a special start. “It was a wonderful, intimate moment of our day that I will cherish forever,” she says.

“Geneve listened to exactly what I wanted and took it to the next level by making everything more spectacular than I could ever have imagined,” she continues. “She never let one detail of the wedding slide by and she was always five steps ahead of me.” Erin felt a real bond with McNally and the two became close friends as they planned the wedding. “I always felt like I was the special one to whom she was giving all her attention,” Erin says. “Geneve was incredible and I simply could not have done it without her.”