Floral Design for WIPA Colorado Q2 — Premiere of Love: Beyond Boulder Limelight Hotel Boulder + St. Julien Hotel & Spa | April 1, 2025
I've lived in Boulder for twenty years. I graduated from CU. I had my babies at Boulder Community Hospital. I met my husband here. And now I'm building Ash + Ether here - a floral design studio rooted in this exact place, this exact light, this exact specific kind of wild.
So when WIPA Colorado invited me to design the florals for their Q2 event, "Premiere of Love: Beyond Boulder," I didn't reach for a mood board. I looked out the window.
What WIPA Is - and Why This Event Mattered
WIPA - the Wedding Industry Professionals Association - is one of the most respected not-for-profit associations in the wedding industry, built in 2008 on a foundation of genuine education, ethics, and the kind of networking that means something. Their Colorado chapter events draw the planners, designers, and creatives who are actively shaping what the wedding industry looks like here. These are not rooms full of people looking to be seen. They are rooms full of people who are building something.
Q2's theme was "Premiere of Love: Beyond Boulder" - a Sundance-inspired soirée built around a conversation that's already happening in this city: Boulder is about to change. The Sundance Film Festival is relocating here. The creative and hospitality industries are paying attention. And this event, held across two of Boulder's most significant venues, was designed to celebrate the storytellers and creatives who are already here - the ones who will still be here when this place becomes somewhere else.
The speaker panel - "Beyond Weddings: Understanding the World of Experiential Events" - featured Fig Wirkler of Visit Boulder, Katie Kosyan of BON Communications, and Heather Dwight of Calluna Events. Three women who understand that the industry is evolving and that Boulder is part of where it's going.
I was invited because WIPA was specifically sourcing Boulder-based vendors. I had met a board member at the Q1 event, expressed interest immediately, and when the call came, I said yes before I had a plan.
The plan came later. It always does.
The Design Vision: Elevated Desert
The color prompt was greens and browns. What I was reaching for was harder to name.
Boulder is a specific kind of place. It has real money - but it wears Patagonia and Lululemon to a $200 dinner and calls that a vibe. There's a particular kind of trust fund hippie that lives here: people who are actively trying not to look elevated while being deeply, quietly precious about everything. It's not fake exactly. It's just complicated. Wealthy but unpretentious. Wild but not careless.
I wanted the design to hold that tension. The palette was sand, moss, almond, sage - colors that read like the foothills in early spring. The vessels were earthy, handmade-feeling, textural - the kind from the moodboard I'd been building for months. Selenite towers instead of candles, because crystals and hippies go hand and hand. You find it in every crystal shop on Pearl Street, on windowsills and nightstands and altars people don't call altars.
And then there were the tumbleweeds.
The Tumbleweeds
I put a call out on the local Facebook group. Someone responded.
They weren't the round, cinematic tumbleweeds I had pictured rolling across a desert highway. They were long, unruly grasses - the kind that catch on fences and blow sideways in the wind. I looked at them and kept going. Added dried grasses from my own yard. Asked my neighbor. Foraged what I could.
That decision - which started as improvisation - became the heart of the whole design. These weren't flowers sourced from a wholesaler and arranged into something beautiful. These were materials from the actual ground of this place, from yards and fields and roadsides in Boulder County, assembled into something that felt like it belonged here because it literally did.
This is what I mean when I say I translate a story into flowers. Sometimes the story is a client's. Sometimes it's a city's.
Limelight Hotel Boulder - The Statement
The afternoon and evening's first act was at the Limelight Hotel Boulder - Boulder's newest and largest conference and event facility, sitting at the intersection of Broadway and University on the CU campus, steps from the Hill and minutes from Pearl Street. The Flatirons Ballroom is 15,000 square feet of airy, light-filled contemporary space with commanding views of the Flatirons and the CU campus. It's a blank canvas with real bones - the kind of space that asks you to be bold.
This was where I had the shortest setup timeline of the night. I set up Limelight myself.
The pieces here were architectural — tall, structural, designed to hold a 26,000-square-foot building. Two towering installations flanking the bar: dried tumbleweeds and prairie grasses erupting upward and outward, six feet tall, like something that grew there overnight. Green hydrangea massing heavy at the base, copper and orange roses threading through, dried fan palms splaying wide. Selenite towers catching the early evening light. Nothing was tidy. Nothing was trying to be.
Guests entered on a red carpet where MiHi Entertainment brought their photo booth activation to the room. The photos were great and there was even an option to turn your photo into a cartoon or painting. Cartoon Ash is a major vibe.
Set for the speaker panel - on either side of the stage, I placed statement vessels on acrylic risers with selenite groupings below. One tall dark ribbed vase: cymbidium orchids in burnt amber, dried fan palms arching sideways, a cascade of white carnations and eucalyptus seeds tumbling down. One round woven vessel: a cloud of peach garden roses spilling full over the rim, spare and lush at the same time. They looked placed casually. They hadn't been.
The Limelight was the arrival. The energy. The first impression for an industry room full of people who notice everything. It needed to read from across the space - and it did.
St. Julien Hotel & Spa — The Intimacy
Then everyone traveled to St. Julien,
St. Julien Hotel & Spa is Boulder's most established luxury property — a four-star, four-diamond hotel named one of Condé Nast Traveler's Best Hotels in the West, sitting at the corner of Ninth and Canyon with Flatiron views from nearly every window. It has over 16,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor event space, six event rooms, and the kind of weight that comes from being the venue where Boulder celebrates the things that matter. Weddings happen here that people talk about for years. It earns that.
The dinner was in the ballroom, where the production team had draped ivory fabric in deep theatrical swags from floor to ceiling — the full cinematic treatment. Tables ran the length of the room. This was the part of the night that was meant to feel like sitting inside something.
My mom and my sister set up St. Julien while I was at Limelight. I gave them the vision and drove away. I real excercise in trust for someone with control issues and limited patience like me.
The centerpieces were built on grapevine roots, straight from California, just like most of Boulder’s population (insert laughing emoji) - actual roots, gnarled and sculptural, running low across the tabletop like something pulled from the canyon floor. Live moss cushioning them into the table. Coral and amber roses pushing through the wood. Pieris japonica cascading in small white bells. Dark basil and purple foliage threading through for depth. Green glass votives. Linen napkins in warm ochre courtesy of Nuage Designs. Sage ceramic plates. The head table ran long, dressed the same way — grapevine roots end to end, selenite towers spaced between, yellow pom-pom chrysanthemums and wild greenery loose enough to feel like the table had been set in a field.
At the door into the ballroom, a half-moon arrangement of antique green hydrangea, rust roses, dark foliage, and bold tropical leaves poured over the seating chart created by Hazel Eye Designs. Bold enough to stop people. Grounded enough to feel like it grew there.
Sweet Sisters Bake Shop - Boulder's beloved gluten-free bakery on South Broadway - brought their custom desserts, because no detail of a night like this should be an afterthought. Sugar Willow Events was part of the planning team that held the whole multi-venue evening together, alongside Mrs. Planner. Sean Lara Photography and ETC Photography captured the design in both spaces, along with Wild Heart Content, who documented the full experience. Mrs. Planner coordinated the details that made the shift between venues feel seamless rather than logistical.
When I walked into St. Julien later that night and saw what my mom and sister had built from my vision - in a room I hadn't set foot in since load-in began - I felt proud.
And then my brain immediately started listing everything I would have done differently.
That part never turns off. But for a moment, before it started, I just stood there.
Great Family Artists provided the evening entertainment, with Colorado Keys on the dueling pianos, All Well Rents provided the rental pieces that grounded the whole build, and Nuage Designs supplied the linens — the earthy, textured layers that let the florals land the way they needed to. Swag Event Decor handled the broader décor and draping production. Hazel Eye Designs created the stationery elements throughout the event, bringing that same story-in-paper sensibility that the florals were reaching for in stems. Gold Rush Transportation moved guests seamlessly between Limelight and St. Julien as the evening shifted.
What This Event Was, Really
I wasn't the story of WIPA Q2. I was the atmosphere. I was there to make the rooms feel like Boulder — to build the ether that everything else happened inside of. Most people in that room probably couldn't tell you why it felt the way it did. They just felt it.
That's the work. That's always been the work.
If you're planning an event in Boulder, at the St. Julien, at Limelight, or anywhere across Colorado's Front Range or mountain venues — this is what Ash + Ether does. We don't decorate spaces. We build worlds inside them.
The Full Vendor Team
Florals: Ash + Ether | ash-ether.com | @ashxether
Venues: Limelight Hotel Boulder | @limelighthotels + St. Julien Hotel & Spa | @stjulienhotel
Entertainment: Great Family Artists | @greatfamilyartists + Colorado Keys | @coloradokeys
Photo Booth + Activations: MiHi Entertainment | mihiphotobooth.com | @mihi_entertainmnet Sound + DJ: Rentals: All Well Rents | @allwellrentsdenver
Linens: Nuage Designs | nuagedesigns.com | @nuagedesignsinc
Draping: Swag Event Decor | @swageventdecor
Stationery: Hazel Eye Designs | hazeleyedesigns.com | @hazeleyedesigns
Desserts: Sweet Sisters Bake Shop | sweetsistersboulder.com | @sweetsistersbakeshopllc
Transportation: Gold Rush Transportation | @grtlimo
Planning: Sugar Willow Events | @sugarwillowevents + Mrs. Planner | @mrsplanners
Photography: Sean Lara Photography | @seanlaraphotography
Video: ETC Photography | @e.t.c_photography
Content: Wild Heart Content | @wildheartcontent