Because they’d been to plenty of weddings where they’d shelled out money for travel and accommodations and only laid eyes on the bride and groom for a few minutes, Sophie Wolf and Brian McPherson wanted to make sure their wedding was different. They had only one criterion: The venue should accommodate all of their guests for a whole weekend.
That really narrowed their search, but when they toured Montfair Resort Farm in Crozet—with cabins that could fit around 60 people—they knew they’d zeroed in on their “I do” spot. From there, they decided to lean in.
“Getting to spend the whole weekend with your best friends in the woods, it felt just like camp,” Wolf (now McPherson) says. Thus, they created Camp McWolf. But they had to walk a fine line between camp and camp-y.
“We didn’t really think of it as a wedding with a ‘theme,’” she says. “We just thought of it as a weekend at camp with our best friends…where we also got married.”
To pull it off, McPherson’s sister designed a logo, which showed up on the invitations and save the dates, then set to work on the day-of details: A custom Instagram account provided guests with info on being a camper, cabin assignments, and schedules, and when guests arrived, they were greeted by goodie boxes with classic camp snacks and handwritten letters. The rehearsal dinner featured DIY’d name plates in the style of camp flags, and guests were invited to partake in a s’mores bar and bonfire. The morning of the wedding, a brown-bag breakfast and kicked off a day of playing camp games before getting ready for the ceremony.
“We lucked out all weekend with great weather,” McPherson says. “Walking around camp seeing our friends in canoes, playing volleyball, and going for hikes was such a cool thing.”
Guests leaned into the theme, too, arriving with fun attitudes that “made the weekend electric,” as well as some custom-made Camp McWolf T-shirts. All in all, the wedding turned out exactly how they’d hoped.
McPherson has some ideas about how to pull off your own theme wedding. For one thing, they took inspiration from the venue for the wedding, not the other way around.
“If we had tried to turn a different kind of venue into a ‘camp’ theme, it would have felt a little try-hard,” she says. And, she says, the couple didn’t feel the need to make every detail part of the theme. The big wedding things stayed the same, but they sprinkled in things that made sense for the weekend (McPherson, for instance, wore a traditional wedding dress—with boots underneath).
Her main advice for your big day, though? Do you.
“What no one ever tells you about wedding planning is that there really don’t have to be any rules,” she says. “You can take the traditions that you like and leave the ones that you don’t. The bride can stand on the right because that’s her good side, you can spend the whole morning of your wedding with your fiancé, you can serve assorted Oreos instead of wedding cake. …Think about the weekend that will make you, your partner, and your guests the happiest, and go create that weekend.”
