It’s almost inconceivable to think now that Oda Jaune and Robin Scott-Lawson might have gotten married in Hydra or Scotland, two destinations that were originally posited. As the couple notes, their London wedding—staged at the Painting Rooms, the home of Scott-Lawson’s creative event production company, My Beautiful City, and 180 the Strand—was so resolutely them. “Our love story is here,” says Robin, who first met artist Oda at one of her show openings.
“I didn’t really notice him at that point,” jokes Oda, before continuing: “I remember the first time I really saw him—I can’t even think of the place, I just thought, I can’t look further into his eyes, I’ll wait for him to approach me.” Robin finally made a move during the pandemic. Oda had relocated from Paris to London to be close to her daughter, who was studying fashion at Central Saint Martins. All of a sudden, she was locked down with the phone number of just one person: Robin. The near stranger offered her his studio to paint in.
“I dreamed away the hours, weeks, months,” says Oda of creating her largest work to date: a 32-foot-long work entitled Tree, 2021, that Robin, who had retreated to the countryside, saw develop bit by bit when visiting the city for hospital appointments with his mother. “It was really love in the time of Covid,” remembers Robin. “It was very beautiful, very quiet, there were no distractions.” Both believe that had the world not stopped, they might not have connected in the same way.
The proposal took place while the couple was in Venice for the Biennale. While party-hopping in torrential rain, soaked to the bone, they snuck into a pop-up club and lost themselves on the dance floor. “Will you marry me?” shouted Robin over the music, sans ring and sopping wet, but overjoyed to see “Yes!” mouthed back in response. Robin delivered an engagement ring later, while on a trip to the Indian jungle.
Back in London, the pair kept all notions of a celebration under wraps as they set out to create a wedding that reflected their imagination and creativity, giving themselves the freedom to dream big. In the end, they invited their inner circle to a pajama party. “We thought about that feeling children get the night before something big is going to happen—like a birthday or Christmas—when they don’t want to go to bed,” says Oda. “They’re so exhausted that they mix reality and dreams.”
Stage one: transforming the Painting Rooms into three different spaces. The first: a cocktail reception that looked like a dissection of a bedroom, where guests—dressed in “the most glamorous going-to-bed attire”—could congregate around sleeping-related ephemera. The second: a 50-foot-long table built to look like a bed, with Oda and Robin at the head, wearing a vintage pink slip and Harvie & Hudson pajamas, respectively, and with a “dreamy” banquet laid out before them. “Everyone was in hysterics,” they remember of the big reveal—but not for long, because the third space, backed by the opera-singing Ellie Edmonds, accompanied by Milo McKinnon, opened to reveal “the ultimate pillow fight room.” “You couldn’t see, it was so white,” says Oda, with Robin adding: “We’re going to be finding feathers for the next 20 years.”