Zoe is a senior product designer at a fintech in Williamsburg. Michael is a documentary photographer who has spent the last six years shooting longform projects in the Pacific Northwest and West Africa. They live in a Brooklyn apartment they renovated together in 2022. They were married in October 2024, in the building.
They had toured six Brooklyn venues by the time they came to us in March 2023. They had ruled out two for being too rustic, one for being too corporate, and three for being unable or unwilling to quote a price before the second meeting. We sent them the rate card in the first reply to their inquiry. They booked the date two weeks later.
The first-look happened on the rooftop at 4:25 PM. The late-October light was warm and long. The Manhattan skyline sat in the deep distance, slightly hazy. Michael cried. Zoe did not, which is consistent with the temperament difference between them, and which Roost's photographer caught in a single quiet frame.
The ceremony was at 5:00 PM on the rooftop. Sixty guests; the other eighty-two were in the gallery downstairs, watching on a discreet 65-inch monitor set up against the south wall. The vows took eleven minutes. The recessional moved everyone down to the mezzanine for cocktail hour.
Cocktail hour ran from 5:30 to 6:30 on the mezzanine. Hors d'oeuvres from Marlow & Sons. A four-piece jazz quartet from the Brooklyn Conservatory played quietly under the brass railing. The view down into the gallery, where the long tables were being set with vermilion ranunculus — the venue's signature color and signature flower — was the photographic highlight of the cocktail hour, and Roost's photographer worked it from three angles.
Dinner started at 7:00 PM. Family-style, with seven long farm tables seating twenty each, plus a sweetheart table for the couple and parents' tables on either end. Small clusters of vermilion ranunculus on every table. Bread from She Wolf Bakery, course one. Roasted-fennel risotto, course two. Braised short rib, course three. The first dance was at 9:30 to a Joni Mitchell cover by the jazz quartet. The parents' dances followed. The dance floor opened at 10:15. The midnight pizza arrived from Roberta's — two blocks away — at 11:55. They left at 12:30 AM under the bistro lights of the rooftop, where the bar had moved for the after-party.