Editorial Shoot at the New MOLLIE Aspen Wedding Venue

This year, I had the opportunity to show off one of the newest Aspen wedding venues: MOLLIE Aspen. This gorgeous editorial shoot was featured in the Rocky Mountain Bride Colorado Spring/Summer 2025 issue. Below, I’ll tell you why this shoot turned out to be the design highlight of my summer, along with examples of how to translate wedding design inspiration into the small details in a way that tells a story.

MOLLIE : Then and Now

The New MOLLIE

In early 2024, the MOLLIE Aspen underwent a major transformation from its previous iteration, the Molly Gibson Lodge, a 1960s era fixture of downtown Aspen named for Aspen’s most successful silver mine. The Aspen hotel was demolished and rebuilt across the street from its original location on Main Street in Aspen, adjacent to Paepcke Park. The MOLLIE’s marketing team was looking for some imagery to show off the hotel as an Aspen wedding venue, so they approached my friend and colleague, photographer Haley Hawn, and I for help. We were thrilled for the opportunity to create some content for their marketing team. 

Haley and I got a special behind-the-scenes peek at the beautifully designed space. We were treated to a tour with the MOLLIE’s marketing team. We not only got to see the gorgeous spaces but learned about the thought process that went into the design, and we were seriously impressed. In creating their brand, the MOLLIE focused not just on a beautiful aesthetic but also drew inspiration from Aspen’s history, from its silver-mining days through the twentieth century.

Aspen History and the Design of the New MOLLIE

A central feature of Aspen’s cultural history is the legacy of Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, a husband-and-wife philanthropist duo who brought a cultural “renaissance” to Aspen in the 1950’s. Their successful and culturally significant Goethe Bicentennial celebration inspired a number of cultural institutions that still exist today in Aspen. Walter and Elizabeth founded the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies which evolved over time into the Aspen Music Festival and School (the nonprofit that brought me to work in Aspen) and the Aspen Institute, which is famous for hosting the Aspen Ideas Festival each June. The Institute fostered the Bauhaus art and architectural aesthetic and celebrated the work of Herbert Beyer, an Aspen resident. His work is on view at The Bayer Center on the Aspen Meadows Resort campus. Anni Albers, a weaver and textile artist from the Bauhaus school, was a primary inspiration for the MOLLIE’s design. 

The thoughtful design, curated by interior design firm Post Company, created a space that felt warm and residential: rich textures, natural materials, textiles, and hand selected furniture. There was no shortage of inspiration in the hotel’s design, and that’s where we focused our attention to brainstorm the design of our photo shoot.

We began our tour in the hotel lobby, and I was particularly inspired by a large woven art piece hanging there, adjacent to the fireplace. The piece had been commissioned by the brand’s design team as a nod to the weavers of the Bauhaus school like Anni Albers. The Post Company then used the design of the art piece for inspiration in creating the hotel’s logo, which was transformed into multiple textural elements including a subtle design on the wrap around the hotel’s SUVs.

The Wedding Design

Inspiration for the Wedding Design

Drawing from the hotel’s Japanese minimalist influences, I wanted to focus on textures in this design. Colors were drawn from the hotel’s brand palette and the materials used: slate blues and navy; warm, earthy rusts and terra cottas seen in the brick, warm ivories in the textures, and neutral colors from the natural wood tones. 

The Ceremony

We situated our ceremony on the MOLLIE’s rooftop terrace which boasts a view of beautiful Aspen Mountain. I really love this space for small weddings and elopements or a larger cocktail reception for brunch. Just inside the hotel from the terrace is an intimate bar with cozy soft seating, perfect for post-ceremony smooches.

The Dress

When it came to choosing a dress, women’s styles from Aspen’s silver-mining era had my brain noodling on a corseted dress style. I found my dream dress in Alon Livne’s Charlotte dress. It was the perfect blend of historical structure and sleek modern lines, and it looked AMAZING on our model Genna.

The Cake

I pulled inspiration for the cake design from an ivory BBJ La Tavola linen with a cross-hatched pattern woven into the fabric. I asked Kenzie of Coppelia Cakes to create a textured buttercream, “raked” in vertical and horizontal stripes to evoke the texture of the textiles and weavings throughout the hotel. (The vanilla cake with mini chocolate chips was delicious, by the way.)

The Floral

Whitney of The Story of Flowers is a Denver florist I’ve always admired. Her style pairs less common varieties of flowers and gorgeous textures. I knew she would be a perfect fit to design for this editorial. Whitney combined clean lines with wilder organic textures for something truly beautiful and unique.

She constructed the bridal bouquet from sleek white calla lilies alongside more organic and textural elements: white stephanotis, white dianthus, salpiglossis, jasmine vine, unruly explosion grasses, and sculptural kiwi vine branches. The groom sported a sculptural boutonniere of kiwi vine, hellebore, stephanotis, and grasses.

The ceremony pieces sat in large textured stone vases and included banksia as a focal element alongside grasses, smoke bush, foraged oak foliage, and allium scapes. A statement piece on the speakeasy bar included eremurus, smoke tree foliage and puffs of smokebush.

A sprawling dinner table centerpiece included ivory spray roses and dancing coreopsis contrasting with more smokebush, explosion grass, and sculptural branches.

The Table Setting

This hotel’s focus on textile art inspired me to find a dinner table linen with lots of woven texture. I found it in a recently released line from BBJ La Tavola. We layered texture on top of texture with a dark rattan charger, topped with ceramic dishes.

The Stationery

Honestly, this was one of the most thoughtfully-designed stationery suites I’ve seen in a long time. I asked my friend and colleague Kate of Skelley West Design Co + Letterpress to design this suite, because I love her letterpress work and the textures she achieves. Kate incorporated so many sweet details to help tell the story we imagined for this editorial shoot.

The wedding invitation suite was encased in a brown fabric-covered box, accented with a topographical map of the Aspen area beneath the blue address section. Kate letter pressed the interior of the box with a plaid pattern taken from MOLLIE’s logo (my favorite part!) The dusty blue accents were drawn from the hotel’s brand color palette.

Kate chose a font that felt reminiscent of the old Aspen of silver-mining days. The name for our *bride* – Annie – was drawn from “Little Annie” of Aspen fame. Kate created a custom logo with Annie and Wade’s initials, which was letter pressed into the hand-torn paper accent at the top of the invitation, and the card was tied with a leather cord accent.

The details card was imprinted with a street map of Aspen. The faux details included a concert experience by the Aspen Music Festival. The reply card envelope was again embossed with the couple’s logo.

At the dinner table, the menu’s design echoed that of the invitation, with a topographical backer card and leather cord, with the addition of vintage metal brackets at each corner. For the place card, Kate used a folded, natural wood-grained paper. She affixed hand-calligraphed names with brackets from an old library card catalog.

Telling the Story

I absolutely adored dreaming up this design concept. Design is really one of my favorite parts of the planning process. What made this one truly special was the collaboration with my incredibly talented colleagues (credited below). When all of the pieces fall into place, the wedding design can tell an entire story with no words at all. And this wasn’t a true “wedding.” While the couple are together in real life, and very in love, they’re not actually married, and they modeled for this particular project. So we were telling a made-up story, so to speak. Just think about all the little ways we could tell a REAL love story through the details.

I love working with couples to dream up wedding designs that tell their story, from the small details to the overarching themes and colors. The benefit of working with a wedding planner who is also a designer can be seen in how the details build a narrative. The magic that I can to bring to a project is in bringing together the ideas and the right combination of vendors to tell execute.

Special thanks to all the vendors who contributed to make this shoot happen:

Venue: MOLLIE Aspen
Photographer: Haley Hawn
Videography: Canvas and Light
Planning: Stargazed Weddings and Events
Florist: The Story of Flowers
Hair: Ana Belen
Makeup: Vanessa Vieni
Dress: Alon Livne White
Suit: Stitch and Tie
Models: Genevieve Brewster @ggennaaa / Reece Montgomery @mon1gomery
Cake: Coppelia Cakes
Stationary: Skelley West Design Co.
Linens: BBJ La Tavola
Rentals: Event Rents
Jewelry: Hughes Jewelry
Accessories: Upstairs Aspen

Have any questions about Aspen wedding venues like MOLLIE? Are you curious about my other favorites? Drop a line via the contact form here on our website! We’d love to hear from you!