Änna and Ryan came up from Chicago at the end of June with about forty people and a clear idea of what they wanted: not much. No wedding party portraits, no big family lineups, no traditions kept just because they were traditions. What they did want was for both halves of their family to spend a full evening together and come away actually knowing each other. Every decision they made about the day pointed back at that.

Änna is a music supervisor, Ryan is a software engineer, and between them they have two dogs named Simon and Drag and a real habit of going places. Their engagement trip was hiking the northern coast of France and then landing at a music festival in London, which tells you most of what you need to know. Their first trip together was a camping weekend in Michigan in July of 2022, two months into dating, where they drove five hours without a reservation, hiked their gear fifteen minutes in to a dispersed site on a small lake, and shared a tent with both dogs. Their wedding fell a few days shy of that trip’s two-year anniversary.

Ryan has a thing he does where he announces to strangers on the street in Chicago that he loves Änna Marsh. He knows it’s obnoxious. He does it anyway. That’s roughly the energy of the whole day.

Ray shot this one solo, which suited it. It was a calm, relaxed Sunday, and Änna and Ryan are calm, relaxed people — the kind of couple whose friends and family take on the same temperature. Ray and Kelly lived in Chicago when they were first married, so there was a lot of Chicago talk that evening with a group of people who were warm and easy to be around from the first hour.

Here’s the day:

The Enchanted Barn is a classy farm, which is a harder combination to pull off than it sounds. It’s an 1800s barn on rolling private land outside Hillsdale, and the property does a lot of the work on its own. Dinner came out of the brick oven — pizza, hot, straight through the evening — and guests spent the stretch before and after wandering the property and feeding the Highland cows. The courtyard in the middle of the barn turned out to be exactly the right size for forty people. A room that fits your whole guest list is worth more at a small wedding than almost anything you could add to it.

The light out there is worth planning around. Late in golden hour the sun comes over the hill and catches the rise on the right, then cuts across into the back field. If you’re getting married at The Enchanted Barn, ask your photographer to build twenty minutes around that.

We photographed Ali and Paul’s wedding at The Enchanted Barn a few years before this one, a much bigger day at the same venue. It’s a good illustration of how much range the place has: 150 guests with a full florist build-out, or forty people, pizza, and cows.

The one piece of ceremony they built from scratch was a wine box. Änna and Ryan each wrote a letter to the other, sealed the letters into a box with a bottle of wine, and closed it up during the ceremony to be opened on a future anniversary. It’s a small thing that takes ninety seconds and gives everyone watching something to hold onto — and it fit them exactly, since it’s less a tradition than a plan.

Shane Kramer of Transmission Music DJed, and he was a genuinely good hang on top of being good at the job. Trü Reverie handled hair. At a forty-person wedding you spend the whole evening around the vendors, so it matters more than usual that they’re people you’d want at the table anyway.

If you’re weighing a wedding this size, it’s worth reading through our guide to the best intimate wedding venues in Wisconsin — The Enchanted Barn is one of a handful of places in the state that works just as well at forty guests as at a hundred and fifty.

Änna and Ryan wanted candid and documentary with a few natural posed frames, and a wedding this size makes that easy. Nobody’s performing. There’s no room to hide and no reason to. By the end of the night the two halves of that family were sitting together in the courtyard talking like they’d known each other for years, which was the entire point.

Vendors from the day:

• Venue – The Enchanted Barn, Hillsdale, WI
• DJ – Shane Kramer, Transmission Music
• Hair – Trü Reverie