Photo by Kerry Jeanne

“Kristine was calm, gentle, and effervescent throughout our year of planning – she made the entire journey fun, even from across the world.”
- Nikki and Tarig, Temple House

Flowers came first. Then styling, because the flowers deserved better tables. Then full design, after one wedding too many where I had built something beautiful and watched a single object from outside the concept undo it. And finally planning - because I kept standing in gorgeous rooms watching gorgeous weddings be quietly undermined by everything happening between the beautiful moments. Guests waiting an hour with nothing to do. A band assembling on stage in the middle of dinner. Tables being moved while people sat at them. Nobody else seemed to mind. I minded enormously.

So I took on the whole weekend. My first full planning commission began in 2019 and was celebrated at Gloster House in 2021 - a colourful gypsophila installation filling the air above the tables, and a weekend that moved exactly as I had drawn it. It was the first time I held everything at once: the design, the flow, the room, the day. It remains one of the most satisfying things I have ever done, and it set the standard for everything since.

Thirteen years on, this is what I know for certain. A wedding is not a collection of beautiful moments. It is the movement between them - the arrival, the gathering, the transitions, the way guests are carried through a weekend without ever once wondering where to go or waiting for something to happen. My family designs things that last: buildings, textiles, gardens. I design something that exists for three days and lives in memory for the rest of your life.

I come from a family of designers.

I am the daughter of two architects - people who think in proportion, light and space as naturally as breathing. My grandmother won competitions in traditional Latvian weaving when she was young, we still have her beautiful woolen throws in my mums house. Later in life she grew flowers - her arrangements were always the prettiest on the street, her winter wreaths unlike anyone else's. I helped her from a young age, thoroughly against my will, and I suspect that is where the work ethic comes from. My uncle worked with ceramics, his sculptures and pottery are still treasured family heirlooms.

My eye comes from all of them: colour and pattern from the weaver and sculptor, a feeling for space and light from the architects, and from Latvia itself a taste that runs muted and layered, with a love of brave colour entirely my own, that took me years to trust.

I trained as an interior designer as a mature student in my late twenties - four years, finished with distinction - and graduated straight into a recession, when design jobs simply did not exist. So in 2013 I started a wedding business instead, with flowers. It was meant to be a stopgap. It turned out to be the point: everything the degree taught me about reading a room, about how people move through space, about why one arrangement of a hall feels generous and another feels confused, found its real home in weddings.