Andrea Whittle and Ben Cutler’s courtship started as a summer flirtation. Ben is one of four brothers, and Andrea went to boarding school with the two oldest, Josh and Peter. “That summer, their ages all added up to 100, so they threw a ‘Cutler Centennial’ at their family home in Maine and piled all of their friends into the house for a week of tennis, sailing, swimming and chaos,” Andrea, who is the features director at magazine, remembers.
The two didn’t start officially dating until the following summer though, when Andrea rented a cabin down the road from their place for the month of June. Three years later, Ben proposed with a sapphire ring in the same kitchen in Maine where they’d had their first kiss. “He picked the stone because the colour reminds him of the ocean,” Andrea says.
The wedding was on 4 May, and there were three locations spread across East 91st Street in Carnegie Hill. “It was a love letter to the neighbourhood I grew up in,” Andrea explains. “And because the first two parts were held in what used to be grand turn-of-the-century private homes, a friend referred to it as a ‘Gilded Age block party.
’” The wedding ceremony and cocktail hour took place in the garden at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Next, guests walked across the street for dinner and dancing at the James A Burden House. And then, at 11 pm, a saxophone player led the group across Madison Avenue for an after-party in the bride’s family home.
“We.
