Denise More

She founded it in Rome in 2018, after a career in art direction and advertising. That is the part of the biography worth knowing, because it explains what the work looks like rather than what it says about itself. She describes leaving a world of images and storytelling for something more tangible: emotions on the skin, experiences that stay. The register of the design changes with the place, and it changes properly. A Medici estate outside Florence is not laid, lit or timed like a masseria in the Itria valley, and neither is like a Roman villa with a view of the whole city from the terrace.

The commercial shape is unusual for a studio at this level in one respect: it publishes a limit rather than a price. There is no fee page. There is an application form, and a stated philosophy whose first line is fewer weddings, deeper involvement. The consequence is easy to check against the portfolio. If your celebration runs four days and six events, the person who answered your first email has to still be in the room on the last of them, and that is only arithmetically possible if the studio takes a small number of them.

Rome is home and it is where the largest share of the work sits. Villa Miani, high above the city, recurs across several celebrations: a black tie wedding with a champagne tower overlooking the rooftops, a total white celebration with stationery drawn from the villa’s own frescoes. Villa Aurelia recurs too, twice with couples from New York, once with a symbolic ceremony held in its secret garden. And there is the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo on the Caelian Hill, the church of the chandeliers, where a Roman ceremony was followed by a dinner show back at the villa.

Working in Rome is mostly a problem of access and timing rather than of beauty. A working church has a fixed slot. A hilltop villa has one road up. Guests arriving from four countries need to be moved through a city that is not going to pause for them. What a good Roman planner sells is not taste, which is abundant here, but a running order that holds.

Beyond the city she publishes five destinations and the portfolio evidences two more. Tuscany brings Tenuta di Artimino, a Medici estate outside Florence, where a storm arrived minutes before the ceremony and the team moved the entire thing indoors in seven minutes. It is the kind of detail a studio only tells you about if it went well. Umbria brings two: Castello di Petrata above the valley, and the Abbazia di San Pietro in Valle, where an Irish couple wanted the medieval frescoes and the portico left to speak, and the design was built to stay out of the way.

Puglia is where the work looks least like anybody else’s. Masseria Montenapoleone, three days, an Iranian and Californian couple, a ceremony among ancient olive trees and an evening that ran long. The Amalfi Coast and Capri are the opposite condition: vertical, expressive and logistically unforgiving, where everything that ends up at a wedding has come up the same coast road past everyone else trying to do the same thing on the same Saturday. Lake Como sits on the published list as the quiet one, and the Lazio coast carries a castle wedding at Castello Odescalchi di Palo and a day on the island of Ponza where the procession went through the streets behind a local band.

The method is set out in six stages and the order matters. Discovery and strategy comes first, fixing the vision and the priorities before anything is booked. Venue and vendor curation second. Creative direction and experience design third, which is where the art direction background does its work: atmosphere and flow, then aesthetics. Planning and budget architecture fourth, with structured timelines and, in her own phrase, full visibility across every phase. On-site coordination fifth. Guest experience and logistics last, treated as its own discipline rather than as a subheading of the wedding day.

That final stage is the one that separates a multi-day studio from a wedding planner running longer hours. Over four days a guest list has to be fed, moved, entertained and returned to its rooms half a dozen times, in a country most of them do not speak the language of. Her Umbrian celebration opened with a sunset welcome party carrying traditional Italian folk music, then ran a fusion ceremony that held Indian and Chinese traditions in the same weekend. Her Tuscan one opened with a rustic barbecue and closed over a brunch with private truffle hunting. Those are logistics operations wearing a party as a disguise.

The studio offers three ways in and the difference between them is scale rather than service level. A refined wedding day experience, for couples planning a single day who want the process structured and the flow of the day held. A multi-day celebration, where the welcome moments and the farewell gatherings are curated as part of one experience with continuity and atmosphere carried across all of it. And an ultra-bespoke experience for the complex ones: exclusive venues, several locations, an elevated standard of production and, in her own careful phrasing, the highest level of discretion. Each is quoted against the destination, the scale and the way the couple wants their guests to live the wedding.

What that framing avoids is the thing most planners do at this level, which is to sell the same service three times under different names and let the price do the differentiating. Here the three routes describe genuinely different productions, and the ultra-bespoke one is the only place the word exclusivity appears at all. The rest of the site is unusually free of the vocabulary this market runs on. There is no talk of dream days or fairy tales. There is a lot of talk about structure, direction, timing, budget architecture and guest logistics, which is what a couple planning a four day event from four thousand miles away actually needs to hear.

The team is named rather than described, which is rarer than it sounds. Claudia coordinates on site. Viviana styles and handles the decorative detail. Luca looks after hospitality and guest logistics. Martina documents the celebration as it happens, for couples who want the weekend to exist somewhere other than the final gallery. Four people plus Denise, and the couples who write reviews mention meeting them by name, which is the tell that the team is not assembled per event.

The reviews read consistently and they are worth reading for what they do not praise. Almost nobody leads on the flowers. An American couple with a three day wedding and six events wrote that the day-of coordination let the bride be fully present in each moment, and that when they flew in with a single day free for a venue walkthrough the team drove out from Rome to meet them. A couple based in Dubai planned for a year and a half across time zones and wrote about the seamless flow of events. Another couple went through a family emergency in the last weeks of planning and wrote that she took over the process.

There is a second thing the reviews keep returning to, and it is availability. A couple in the United Kingdom who decided in 2019 to marry in January 2020 wrote that she had very little time and made the day incredible anyway. A French couple in love with Rome wrote that she understood what they had in mind from the first meeting and recommended suppliers as good as she was. An Italian couple wrote about being calmed down when they had doubts and supported when she saw them enthusiastic, which is a description of a job that is only half logistics. Read fifteen of these in a row and the pattern is response speed, a timeline that held, and someone still present at the end of it.

The recognition is checkable. Lux Life Magazine named her Best Wedding Planner and Stylist in Rome in 2022, and the Wedding Planners Pro Business Community recognised her as Best Destination Wedding Planner in Italy. There are also three films on her own channel from the studio’s earlier years, styled shoots rather than client weddings, which are worth a look for what they say about where the eye started: a country chic wedding, an industrial one, a vintage woodland one, none of them the same.

So the fit is easy to describe. A couple marrying in Italy from somewhere else, who want more than one evening out of the journey, whose guest list is travelling and whose families may be arriving from more than one culture. Who would rather have a small named team than a large anonymous one. Ask about the date first. The studio publishes a limit rather than a price, and the limit is the thing that runs out.