By the time Niomi Shah and Kushal Dagli began planning their wedding, they had already lived several versions of life together. Across coasts, cities and eventually a shared home, their relationship had settled into something steady. “For us, getting married wasn’t really about starting a new life together,” Shah says. “It was more like, we love what we have, let’s have more of this.”
That thought shaped a wedding that unfolded over two days at the KBG Golf Club in Ahmedabad; intimate, considered and guided by design as a way of thinking.
Shah, a designer who completed her master’s at Columbia University and worked in New York City before moving to San Francisco, met Dagli, an engineer, at a jazz bar in New York. They were living on opposite coasts at the time. “I distinctly remember wearing a sharp navy blue overcoat, which he instantly fancied,” Shah recalls. That night stretched into long conversations about cities, art and shared sensibilities, eventually leading Dagli to ask her out on a date in San Francisco.
A month later, Shah flew west. A weekend in California, among redwood trees and a quiet brook, became their first real stretch of time together. Over the next year, they moved between cities, staying in Airbnbs, talking about life goals and eventually moving in together during the pandemic.
The proposal, too, followed their instinct for privacy. Shah proposed to Dagli in Joshua Tree National Park. “I wanted it to be just the two of us,” says the bride. The moment was never posted online, shared only with a few close friends. “It’s rugged, raw and open,” she adds. “That felt authentic to us.”
When it came to the wedding, the couple was certain of two things: it would be in India and it would be planned together. “The 50–50 partnership really defines us,” Shah says. They explored venues across Gujarat and heritage properties in Rajasthan, but kept returning to the same question–how would this feel for their guests? “We wanted people to be able to actually join us, not just attend,” she explains. The KBG Golf Club, with its uninterrupted green views on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, offered exactly that.
They planned the entire wedding themselves, remotely from the US. For Shah, design became both process and anchor. “I designed everything: the invites, the decor, the outfits, the jewellery, all of it,” she says. The mood board was rigorous and exacting, guiding vendor selection, styling and spatial decisions. Dagli was an active collaborator throughout, even creating a detailed Excel matrix comparing photographers before they chose Eshant Raju and his team.
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