Kate Grandjean and Zack Gragen Wedding
May 24, 2009 | Gelston House, East Haddam | Photography by Joe Pecorano of Joseph's Photography in Cheshire
Kate Grandjean knew Zack Gragen was the one not long after Mike Smith—his friend from childhood and hers from Yale—introduced the couple. “Zack and I got to be close friends very quickly,” says Kate. “There was definitely a feeling early on. It felt completely meant to be.”
But they were in no hurry, and four years elapsed between that 2000 meeting in New London and Zack’s proposal at the Eiffel Tower in 2004. Kate was busy with her career in public relations while Zack, a Rutgers graduate, commuted to a job as a chemical engineer at Emerson & Cuming in Canton, Mass. Then the two moved to the Boston area, where she pursued a Ph.D. in history at Harvard while he moved on to Henkel International in Billerica, and earned an MBA at Bentley University in Waltham. Both graduated in 2008. It was then that they began to plan their wedding.
“We wanted something that felt intimate,” says Kate, who describes a family dinner at the Gelston House, overlooking the Connecticut River in East Haddam, that settled the matter. “I’m a historian and I study Colonial New England, and that river is very central to the Colonial period,” she explains. “The location spoke to me on that level.”
Everything else fell into place, including her elegant silk gown by Barbra Allin. All 60 guests enjoyed a filet mignon dinner and danced into the night to deejay music by Cheshire’s Jason Atsales, who played “Sleeping Angel” by Stevie Nicks for the couple’s first dance.
“This was a great couple to photograph,” says Joe Pecoraro, owner of Chester-based Joseph’s Photography. “Even though we knew a storm was coming, it created this great soft light, particularly by the calm of the water.”
Immediately after the ceremony, “I remember Zack saying, ‘We did it, we did it,’” recalls Kate, who is now a history professor at Wellesley College and resides with Zack in Marlborough, Mass. “That was the only moment all night that it was just the two of us. That was the most special to me.”
