Lauren and Jeff got married at the Charmant Hotel on December 27th, and by the time Ray arrived to start photographing, the sun had already gone down. The first frames of the whole wedding are the outside of the hotel at blue hour, brick and arched windows against that deep winter color that holds for about twenty minutes and then quits. There was no daylight in this wedding at any point. Not one frame of it.
Lauren and Jeff met in college in 2007. Jeff joined the Army, deployed to Afghanistan in 2011, and on a two-week leave home he ran into Lauren. Physically ran into her, is how she tells it. What came out of that was letters, messages, and waiting for him to land back stateside. Seven years later they were standing in a room in downtown La Crosse in front of ten people, eleven counting Ray.
Ten guests, their closest friends, all of it on purpose. A larger reception was already on the calendar for the following summer, which freed this day up to be exactly the thing they wanted first. Lauren’s childhood best friend Helen officiated. Tom, who is Jeff’s oldest friend and also Lauren’s friend from college, stood up as their shared best man. Francesca was maid of honor. Winter jewel tones throughout, emerald and cranberry and ivory, against Christmas decorations already up in the room.
They skipped a first look. The first time they saw each other was when Lauren walked in. But they had traded a book of vows earlier without seeing each other, which is a good way to get both things.
Photographs from Lauren and Jeff’s December wedding at the Charmant Hotel in La Crosse, Wisconsin, including the ceremony in the Parlour, dinner at the Freighthouse, and evening portraits outside the hotel and on their top-floor balcony.
There was a long stretch in our earlier years when a December inquiry made us hesitate before answering. The reason was all about the light. In Wisconsin in late December the sun is down before five, so you can’t take anyone outside for portraits, and whatever light the venue happens to have is the light you get. That varies wildly from room to room. We took those weddings. We just didn’t always say yes with much enthusiasm.
That’s changed, for two reasons. Cameras got better, meaningfully so. And we got better. At this point we can shoot in about anything you can see in. Candlelight, a couple of lamps along the side of a room, the glow off a Christmas tree, all of that is workable now. Better than workable, because low light does something to a room that daylight can’t. It closes the room in. It makes a small group of people feel like the only people anywhere. There’s a mood available in a dark December room that simply isn’t available at six o’clock in June, and we stopped treating it as a problem to solve a while ago.
Ray shot this one alone, which fit. Ten people in a small room doesn’t need two photographers working it.
We’d been inside this building before it was a hotel, back when the renovation wasn’t finished, walking floors that weren’t going to stay that way much longer. We do that everywhere. Walk into a space and start picturing a wedding in it whether or not anyone has asked. This one was easy to picture.
The history behind it is genuinely good. The building went up in 1898 as the Joseph B. Funke Candy Company factory and made candy until 1933. After that it spent decades as a furniture store, right up until 2013. Don and Roxanne Weber bought it and put around $30 million into a restoration that kept the maple floors, the timber beams and the exposed brick, and it opened as a hotel in the fall of 2015. Even the name is a candy reference. Charmant was Funke’s premium line of chocolates, and it also happens to mean charming in French. The site is where La Crosse itself started: a fur trader named Nathan Myrick put up a log cabin here in 1842, and there’s a plaque on the property saying so.
They were married in the Parlour, which isn’t a large room. Exposed brick, a La Marzocco GB5 espresso machine on the coffee bar, more the feel of a cafe than a ballroom, and that’s the reason it works this well for a wedding this size and wouldn’t work at all for a bigger one. Their ten guests sat at the tables. It could have taken a handful more people comfortably. It could not have taken sixty, and nobody should ask it to. Plenty of couples get ready at the Charmant, but as far as we were told, Lauren and Jeff’s was the first ceremony held in the building since it reopened as a hotel.
Later in the evening we went outside anyway, dark or not. Riverside Park is a block away with its Christmas lights up for the season, so there was a whole park’s worth of light to work with. The cobblestone street in front of the hotel was throwing reflections back. And their room was one of the four top-floor suites, the ones with a wrap-around balcony over downtown and the Mississippi. A wedding with no daylight in it still produced a full evening of portraits in three different kinds of light.
Dinner was a couple of blocks over at the Freighthouse, an 1880 railway freight house that’s been a steak and seafood restaurant since 1978 and sits on the National Register. Moving between buildings over the course of an evening is underrated at a small wedding. It gives the night a shape that one room can’t give it on its own.
One more thing, because it’s the kind of detail that stays with us. When we asked Lauren for a favorite childhood memory, she wrote about summers in La Crosse with her grandparents, fishing the Mississippi early in the morning before anyone was up. She described the quiet as deafening. She got married a block from that river. Jeff, for his part, grew up an army brat between Germany and most of the US before his family finally settled in Wisconsin in 2005, and he told us the friends who’d be standing there on his wedding day were the ones he met once the moving stopped. That’s who was in the room.
Jeff also told us, when we asked what mattered most about the day, that he wanted to remember every possible moment of it, and then admitted he doesn’t have the best memory. That’s the job. That’s the whole job.
Congratulations, Lauren and Jeff.
