Amber Guinness and London–based journalist Matthew Bell’s initial meeting was almost a missed connection. “We were at my cousin Molly Guinness’s wedding,” remembers Amber, a freelance private chef who leads courses at The Arniano Painting School, located on her family’s private villa in Tuscany. “Matthew happened to be an old friend of hers, and even though we were two of the few single people in attendance, we were not seated next to one another, as Molly assumed that we knew each other and didn’t fancy one another. It’s funny how, really, people have no way of predicting who will hit it off. When we finally talked, we worked out that we’d crossed paths many times before and had been to lots of the same parties, but we had never consciously registered each other until that day.”
After dinner, Matthew saw Amber talking to one of her many family members and decided to approach her. “He very uncharacteristically marched up and said, ‘You’re the most beautiful woman here, and I’m not leaving until you kiss me,’ ” Amber remembers. “I was taken aback but rather impressed. We spent the whole night dancing.” In a plot twist straight out of Cinderella, Matthew failed to put together the fact that Amber was Molly’s cousin and instead assumed she was a friend of the groom’s. He thought he had lost her after they said goodnight at the end of the evening and spent the next few days frantically trying to uncover her identity. But fate intervened, and they ended up bumping into each other at a Christie’s party in London roughly a week later—and that was that. “It was a fancy-dress party. Matthew was a figure from a Gainsborough painting, and I was a geisha. How could either of us resist?”
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Fourteen months later, Matthew proposed. “He’s very bad at keeping secrets and let it slip that he was already looking at rings in April, ten months after we met,” admits Amber. “He said that he knew the minute he saw me at Molly’s wedding.” When Matthew popped the question in August, the two were on top of a cliff in Cornwall, England. “It had been very cold and rainy, and we were soaking wet, but the minute the sun came out, the heat was sweltering,” Amber recalls. “I was wearing gum boots, and Matthew chivalrously knelt down to help me take them off because it was so hot. Suddenly, I found myself wearing one boot. And I was looking at Matthew, who was on one knee holding a beautiful ring in an antique box, asking me to marry him. I screamed, ‘Yes!’ Then, he produced a bottle of Pol Roger Champagne and two glasses, which he had been artfully hiding inside his coat. We had a 10-minute window before it then started raining again.”
The couple decided to get married in Florence, Italy. “We chose to get married on a Thursday, so the city wouldn’t be too busy or touristy like it would have been on a Saturday night,” says Amber. “There was something truly cosmic about Florence being overrun by all of our favorite people in the middle of the week. In the days before, I would walk down the street and not see hundreds of faceless groups of tourists, but several beloved and well-known faces wandering around, looking for a bar or yet another delicious place to eat.”
With only 10 months to go until the big day, planning was a whirlwind, but Amber and Matthew were lucky to have the help of the mother of the bride, Camilla Guinness. “Amber’s mother is an interior designer, and she has an amazing imagination and eye for detail—we are incredibly grateful to her for organizing and styling everything,” says Matthew. “From the invitations, which she designed and drew by hand, to the 10-feet-high trees, cut from the estate at Arniano and used to decorate the church, she was the mastermind behind it all.” The setting for the ceremony was St. James, the American Episcopal church in Florence where David Bowie married Iman in 1992. Various themes emerged organically during the planning period: Camilla drew Italian cypress trees on the invitations and followed that up with the creation of 12 gold-painted, life-size cypress trees erected to decorate the dance floor. The New York–based artist Hugo Guinness, a close friend and cousin of Amber’s, drew an illustration of the Duomo in Florence for the cover of the service sheet, which also served as the menu. “Camilla has inimitable style and the ability to make things her own, and this was no different,” says Matthew. “She outdid herself. One cousin of Amber’s told us the next day how his mother found him after the speeches, put her hand on his shoulder, and solemnly told him that he must take in every detail of the evening because he would never go to another wedding as wonderful as this. Another guest said the whole event ‘managed to combine grandeur with style and informality, in perfect measure.’ ”
After dinner, the bride’s friend Alex Sheridan, cousin Mary Charteris, and Mary’s husband, Robbie Furze, played music that had people on the dance floor all night. “We love dancing, so this was always going to be a big part of the night,” says Amber. At midnight, she changed into another Jane Bourvis look that she’d spotted during one of her dress fittings. “It was perfect for what turned out to be a good five hours of dancing!”
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