While visiting their families for the holidays in Northern Virginia, interior designers Cameron Billinghurst and Nolan Beck Rivera went on a Tinder date. As a sweet gesture, Cameron brought Nolan a single calla lily when they met for coffee. The two lost touch until exactly one year later, on December 26, 2019, when the two bumped into each other at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “We reconnected and started talking every day,” Cameron says. During COVID, the two became even closer and decided to move in together in Richmond, Virginia. “We figured we could just rent a place and leave if we didn’t like it, but we found such an amazing creative community here,” says Cameron. “We’re six years in, and I don’t see us moving.” Not only did they become romantic partners, but they also co-founded a design firm, Studio Tarea, which focuses on bespoke interiors for residential and commercial spaces.
While it wasn’t a proposal, Nolan did have rings made for them both with The Circle Craft just a few months into dating. “I avoided calling them engagement rings for a while, and ‘promise ring’ had a weird ring to it,” he says. “So I just kind of said, ‘Oh here, I made us matching rings,’ and that was it.” In fact, there was no proposal at all when the couple started planning their wedding. “We started talking about what we’d both want out of a wedding and after a few years of that, we decided to just put a date on the calendar,” says Cameron. Adds Nolan, “Not very romantic, but we’re pragmatists. It just kind of felt like it was going to happen from the beginning.”
As they kicked off planning, the hospitality-inclined pair wanted to put guest experience first throughout the day and tap their creative community to bring everything to life. “From the get-go, we knew who we could trust to take our ideas and build something cool on top of them,” says Cameron. “We’ve also been to many weddings and made sure to include the things we loved while skipping some of the expected traditions that didn’t resonate.” Jokes Nolan, “We really streamlined a lot of the romance out of this thing. We just wanted everyone to arrive, have enough to eat and drink, and cut a rug with us.” He adds, “There were no jerks at this wedding. Everyone that was working it and everyone we invited was just the best.”
