By Simone Beaumont · Eleanor Harwick & Miles Okonkwo · September 20, 2025 · Bluff Point Estate, Stonington, Connecticut · 5 min read
Eleanor kept telling me she didn’t want a “big” wedding. What she actually meant, I learned over coffee in Mystic that February, was that she didn’t want a loud one. She wanted her grandmother — ninety-one, sharp as ever, no longer up for crowds — to experience the whole day. So we moved the ceremony to the bluff’s west lawn, angled the chairs toward the porch where Nonna would sit with her tea, and had June & Ferry set up a second camera trained on her face. When Eleanor came down that grassy aisle between the wildflower rows, the first thing the guests heard wasn’t the strings. It was her grandmother laughing.
Miles, who had practiced his walk down the aisle exactly zero times, stopped three times to wave at her. Three. The photographers got every one.
The florals were deliberately loose — Salt Marsh Flowers built everything that morning from what was still blooming: dahlias past their perfect moment, Queen Anne’s lace going to seed, grasses already turning. Eleanor loved that nothing looked held together. “It looks like the bluff,” she said, and that became the compliment of the night.
Dinner was served family-style on the terrace as the sun went down behind Ram Island. The Harbor Kitchen’s sweet corn bisque — late September corn, the last of it — is the dish people are still texting Eleanor about. The Stonington Strings played “Canon in D” because Nonna asked, and DJ Ada Reyes opened the dancing with Fela Kuti because Miles asked, and both were right.
They walked down to the water at the end of the night, alone, while the rest of us stood on the bluff and didn’t follow. That’s the memory I keep from this one: two hundred people quietly agreeing to let a couple have five minutes with the sea.
— Simone
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