Jamaica Destination Wedding: An Old-Hollywood Celebration in Ocho Rios

27.11.2024 - 13:33 / cntraveler.com

Growing up in San Francisco, Caitlin de Lisser-Ellen visited her mother’s native Jamaica annually—and it was on the Caribbean island that, as a child, she had one of her first experiences of how magical a wedding could really be: At an aunt’s nuptials at Frenchman’s Cove, “a resort that was really popular in the 1950s with Hollywood people like Errol Flynn, we partied until 4:00 am,” she says. “I couldn’t tell if [it was that] I was just a child, or this was actually the coolest wedding I would ever go to. That stuck in my head as the type of wedding where people can let loose and enjoy.”

Years later, Caitlin grew up to be a film and TV producer. She got engaged to John G. Santoro—now a criminal defense attorney with the public defender's office—who she met in college in New York City. And the vision of Jamaica loomed large for the now Oakland, California-based couple: The island means a lot to the bride’s family, and is a significantly more affordable place to get married than big US cities in the Northeast (John is from Connecticut) and California where the couple have friends and family.

So they opted for the bride’s ancestral Jamaica, marrying in Ocho Rios in February 2024. Ahead, how the couple planned an Old Hollywood-themed celebration complete with a pig roast, a pool party, and a plenty of martinis.

Caitlin visited her mother's native Jamaica annually as a child, and met John in New York City in college. They now reside in Oakland, California.

Tropical flowers like anthurium and birds of paradise plants, arranged by their planner Chalene, dominated tablescapes at the wedding.

While Caitlin’s Jamaican family members are based around the northeastern city of Port Antonio, the couple worried that it was too far from the country’s major airports—and thus inconvenient for most of their guests. “The places I’d grown up going to were ultimately not going to make sense, so we looked at estates and hotels that were within a two-hour range from the airport, and could give us the bespoke experience we were looking for,” she says. Resorts around Negril were vetoed for being a bit too small and public; some towns also had noise ordinances the couple didn’t want to worry about. Most properties in that area offered standardized event packages, which the couple felt were too cookie-cutter.

The couple found the right area in Ocho Rios, a smaller port town on the north coast within their desired distance of the airport, and packed with beautiful, historic estates. They chose one of those estates, Frankfort Villa, as both the wedding venue and their home base. “It could [fit] the most people, and we could have the most privacy and the most free reign,” John says. The white-washed, 17th-century fort-turned-villa