Inside a wedding in Marrakech where the bride wore a Kanjivaram sari woven by the groom’s family

Kinal Patel and Sanjeeve Sivakumar’s wedding in Marrakech began, in some ways, with a Haribo ring. When the London-based couple first met on Hinge in the summer of 2023, Sivakumar, a cosmetic dentist from a Sri Lankan Tamil-Hindu family, arrived for their first date with the sweet after the two had already joked about marriage. “Some might say I could see the future,” he says. Patel, who works in financial crime at a fintech company and comes from an Indian Gujarati family with ties to India and Uganda, was not immediately planning her wedding after one drink in a speakeasy. Within two months, the pair had booked a trip to New York together. “What’s the worst that could happen? I can always just book a flight home if I need to,” she remembers telling herself. Instead, the trip became five days of restaurants, bars and a free flight upgrade. On their last day in the city, he asked her to be his girlfriend.

Sivakumar proposed in Italy during a two-week road trip across Milan, Lake Como, Lake Garda and the Dolomites, which Patel believed had been planned around her birthday. Sivakumar had spent months arranging a private hour at the boathouse at Lago di Braies, a place Patel had spoken about on their early dates. The ring, initially meant to be a temporary ruby before they designed the real one together, arrived as a sapphire days before the trip–a replacement was found in time. The weather, after days of rain and fog, cleared on the morning of the proposal. “When we walked up to the lake, there was no one there,” Patel says. “I noticed some flowers on the deck and, in a total dumb moment, I just said, ‘Oh, those flowers are nice.’”

The couple had pictured a wedding in Rajasthan–Patel had grown up dreaming of it and the two spent months speaking to planners in India, looking at venues and planning for a November 2025 celebration. Hotel rates and travel costs during peak wedding season made the plan difficult, especially since the couple were paying for the wedding themselves. “We felt it was extremely unfair to pass such large travel costs on to our guests,” Patel says. “I wasn’t really a beach or castle girl, so at that point, my wedding dreams felt a bit shattered.”

Marrakech was the compromise that did not feel like one. Palais Namaskar, with its arches, stonework, water features and name that felt unexpectedly familiar, gave the couple a way to carry the feeling of Rajasthan into Morocco. Sivakumar was already travelling to Marrakech with his cousins, so Patel flew in for one night to see the property with him. “The moment we saw it, I turned to Sanj and said, ‘This is the one,’” she says. When a full three-day celebration at Palais Namaskar pushed the budget too far, their planners, Philocaly Wedding & Events, helped them split the festivities across two venues: the mehndi at Palais Soleiman and the remaining functions at Palais Namaskar.

The couple hosted 130 guests for five events. A UK wedding, they say, could have crossed 500 guests easily, especially with family expectations on both sides. For a destination wedding in Marrakech, the smaller guest list also allowed the couple to make the experience feel considered from arrival. Guests received welcome bags with local crisps and nuts, Mukti tea, bindi packets, earrings, atomisers, personalised playing cards, Morocco fridge magnets, electric handheld fans and hangover kits. Patel also made custom keyrings, hotel key card envelopes, wedding door hangers and morning newspapers that shared the day’s schedule, fun facts and icebreakers for guests from both sides. “I didn’t outsource a single piece of the personalisation,” she says. She turned their living room into a workshop and travelled to Marrakech a month before the wedding with six suitcases filled with handmade details.

The mehndi at Palais Soleiman opened the weekend with Moroccan folk dancers, belly dancers, candles and a traditional Moroccan buffet. As a nod to Sivakumar’s heritage, the couple found a South Indian chef in Marrakech who made mutton rolls, a Tamil delicacy, to serve as canapés. The next day at Palais Namaskar, the haldi took place against the palace arches with clusters of yellow and orange flowers. It was followed by an all-white pool party, where guests arrived in white while the couple wore colour. Personalised cocktail stirrers, edible cocktail toppers, custom inflatables and an alcohol-infused gelato station turned the afternoon into the weekend’s most playful interlude.

Patel and Sivakumar chose to give both their cultures their own space, holding two wedding ceremonies on the same day. The morning began with a Sri Lankan Tamil ceremony for Sivakumar’s family, followed by a Gujarati ceremony in the afternoon for Patel’s. Both took place on a custom floating mandap built over Palais Namaskar’s water walkway. “Merging rituals like the thali and the mangalsutra all in one day was intense but incredibly special,” the couple says. “It felt like we managed to bring the spirit of home to the desert.”

Patel’s first bridal look was the most sentimental piece of the wedding. For her morning entrance, she wore a custom Kanjivaram silk sari that she had designed herself, with the patterns and details woven from scratch by her father-in-law’s sari business in Chennai. With it, she wore antique gold temple jewellery, including a heavy necklace, jhumkas and a maang tikka. Later, for the Gujarati ceremony, she changed into a heavily detailed Marwar Couture lehenga weighing 16kg, styled with a bespoke polki diamond bridal set that included an uncut diamond choker, layered long necklace, maatha patti, nath and earrings. Sivakumar wore an embroidered ivory sherwani with a matching dupatta for the wedding.

Patel changed into an Opus Atelier gown with brilliant-cut diamond jewellery for the reception, then changed into a Solace London dress for the after-party, leaving her neck bare and wearing geometric diamond earrings to accentuate a surprise haircut. Between the ceremony and reception, her planner secretly arranged for a hairstylist to come to her room, where Patel chopped her hair short. None of the guests knew, nor did Sivakumar, who loves her short hair. “Walking out into the reception party with a brand-new style was one of the best surprise reactions of the weekend,” she says.

The reception brought together a three-course Indian and Moroccan dinner, a champagne tower in place of a wedding cake, a classical violinist during cocktail hour and a fire show framed by the arches and water features of Palais Namaskar. The couple had spent the pool party taking a photograph with every guest, then had the images printed overnight, placed into magnetic frames and used as place cards at the reception tables, each one accompanied by an individual thank-you note. The evening’s most emotional surprise came during Sivakumar’s speech, when he spoke Gujarati after five months of secret practice. The couple also debuted a surprise dance routine, followed by a performance by the bride’s brother.

For Patel, the wedding’s biggest success was not one detail, venue or outfit, though there were many contenders. It was the accumulation of moments that refused to go as planned: the free upgrade on the trip that made their relationship ‘official’, the sapphire that was meant to be a ruby, the cleared skies in the Dolomites, a secret haircut and a surprise speech in Gujarati. “You can plan the logistics,” she says, “but it’s the unscripted moments that make the wedding unforgettable.”

Kunaal Gosrani Photography1/32