palm beach story; At a seaside wedding in Florida, William Norwich reports, Gold Coast tradition and New York City chic were a match made in heaven.

Byline: William Norwich

After the diamond, a girl's best friend, especially when she is getting married, is her party planner, the brighter the better.

Happily for Celerie Kemble, the interior decorator, one of her very best friends is Bronson van Wyck, the handsome special-events planner to some of the country's most social stars. (He did Marina Rust's wedding to Ian Connor in Maine, as seen in Vogue in 1999.)

The newlyweds met about six years ago, when a mutual friend recommended Celerie to decorate Boykin Curry's apartment. And when Celerie and Boykin, a Manhattan financier whose current projects include the creation of a new resort called Playa Grande on some 2,000 acres in the Dominican Republic, became engaged last year, the bride never wondered whom to call. "Even if we weren't best friends, I would have wanted Bronson," Celerie said. "We both have the same aesthetic. In our businesses there are a lot of people who just spend money professionally, but our focus is interpreting for our clients, drawing out their self-expression, their whimsy." Celerie and Bronson, whose mothers also were school chums, went to Groton together and stayed thick and thin through her years at Harvard and his at Yale.

The setting for the wedding also was never in doubt. Maddock Jungle, the Palm Beach family place of the bride's mother, Mimi McMakin, casts a compelling spell. It dates back to the late nineteenth century, with five houses on the property, including "the Church," which is Mimi's house and was the original Bethesda-by-the-Sea church, deconsecrated in the thirties. You would have to have been born understanding wicker, and I hope you were, to appreciate the great chic and significance of this dazzling, ramshackle palace, set on a hill over the Intercoastal Waterway (or "lake," as they say in P.B.). It is, as far as I know, the only place in the restricted resort without a hedge to keep people out.

The ceremony was held on the lawn near the lake. "Entertaining outdoors gives the hosts a dialogue between the rustic and refined," said Bronson. "Just as a wedding, as an event, is a dialogue between the sacred and the secular."

The docks, the trees, and bushes were lighted with thousands of tiny ...