Santa Barbara Is the Destination for
This Vancouver, BC, Couple
Betrothed Couple from Vancouver Plan and
Execute the Perfect Santa Barbara Destination Wedding
By Maggie Yates | January 30, 2025
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Read more of our 2025 Wedding Guide here.
While Santa Barbara residents may grumble about traffic or June Gloom or e-bikes on State Street, for visitors from other regions of the world, our city seems like a lush, Spanish-style paradise on the Pacific. Santa Barbara is consistently a top destination-wedding hotspot, giving couples from all over the chance for beach-weather vows in a place of extraordinary beauty and historic significance. The wedding industry in Santa Barbara is thriving, and many local venues have become masters of matrimonial convenience, making planning a destination wedding from afar easy, breezy, beautiful, CoverGirl: Wedding Edition!
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One such couple is Lindsay and Aniki Britton from Vancouver, BC, who married in Santa Barbara last autumn. The couple met a decade ago through work, dated for five years, got engaged two years ago in Hawai‘i — and then faced planning a wedding. They considered a larger local wedding for convenience and a smaller Maui wedding for intimacy, but when Lindsay’s father and stepmother suggested their town of Santa Barbara, Aniki said, “It’s a very easy sell…. We kind of had rubber arms.”
Where the couple was easily convinced to spend a sultry, late-summer weekend by the beach, so, too, were their guests similarly swayed. “It was the weekend after Labor Day, so it was pretty easy to get our friends here,” said Aniki. “ ‘Extend your summer by a few days! Come to our wedding or have a vacation in California…. Just be there at the wedding on this day.’ And to get from Vancouver, most people either flew into Santa Barbara or L.A., then drove. It wasn’t like asking people to fly to Europe.”
Thus began the planning for a very Central Coast wedding, complete with a taco truck, craft beer and local wine, a wedding on the courthouse lawn, and photos in front of the Arlington Theatre with Lindsay’s and Aniki’s names emblazoned on the marquee. The couple met many of their planning and organizational needs through Instagram research, including their reception venue, Villa & Vine, on the corner of State and Arlington. A popular reception venue for medium-sized wedding parties, Villa & Vine can offer suggestions for local vendors they typically work with, which is particularly helpful for out-of-town couples. Like many venues, they tag their collaborators on their social media, so swipe around to see what’s been offered at previous events.
Of course, the couple also noted that previous Independent Wedding Guides to have been extremely helpful in the creation and execution of their milestone event.
Lindsay and Aniki opted for a more laid-back, California-style aesthetic for their celebration, leaning into a classic neutral minimalism (“I’m not going to look up the pictures in 10 years and be like, ‘Oh my god, what did you do?’ ” said Lindsay). A nice aspect of the courthouse lawn and Villa & Vine as venues, the couple says, is that the sites do most of the heavy lifting where splendor and style is concerned. “A lot of that stuff is already built-in,” said Lindsay. “It’s naturally beautiful. We chose these [venues] partially because we didn’t feel like we needed to add a ton of decor to it.” Additional florals were done by Courtney Jones of Among the Wildflowers, the florist for Ventura-based event planners Three Sisters Events.
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Suggestions from Santa Barbara locals also added some unexpected frivolity and candid memories to the celebration when a photo booth was added to the mix and DJ Bonnie was hired to spin tunes at the reception (find Bonnie, photo booth, and more at musicbybonnie.com). “We were on the fence about getting a photo booth, but then 100 percent happy immediately,” says Aniki. Added Lindsay: “The person with the photo booth supplied props, and everyone had a great time. It was also really fun to look at the little photo strips afterward.”
The couple gave a big shout-out to DJ Bonnie. “It was exactly what we wanted,” said Lindsay, “just a fun time with our friends and family.” Aniki agreed: “It was a big party with 40 of our favorite people.”
Every destination has its local flair for celebratory traditions. A Hawaiian wedding has tropical flowers; Napa Valley has the vineyards. In Santa Barbara, the venues are iconic and a taco truck keeps everyone happy. Not to mention you’re hard-pressed to pick a day with bad weather!
But for Lindsay and Aniki, the most special aspect of their wedding was the guests. “We had all of our favorite people there, and because it wasn’t so big, there was no one that we didn’t get to say hi to,” said Lindsay. “This is the one time in your life, most likely, that all of your favorite people are going to be in the same room. And you want everyone to have a good time.”
“I think we got lucky in that everything went off without a hitch,” said Aniki. “There wasn’t a thing out of place … everything was perfect.”
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