The Chuppah, the Mandap, and the Structures That Aren’t Just Decoration

Someone asked me a few years ago, at a wedding in Riverdale, whether the chuppah was “basically an arch.” The rabbi was standing about four feet away. I said no, carefully, and then spent most of the cocktail hour explaining why, and I’ve been meaning to write that explanation down ever since. Some ceremony structures are decor. Some are the ceremony. A lot of the wedding designers NYC couples get referred to can build a beautiful arch, and far fewer understand the difference between an arch and a chuppah, or between a mandap and a pergola with pretty fabric on it. In this city, where half the weddings I do have at least one tradition built into the structure, that’s not a small thing.

So here’s what I’ve learned, mostly by asking a lot of questions and occasionally getting it wrong.

The chuppah has rules, and the rules come first

A chuppah is a covering. Four poles, a cloth across the top, open on all sides. That’s the whole thing, and every part of it means something. The open sides are the point. They’re Abraham’s tent, hospitality, a house with no walls. So the single most common mistake I see is a florist who closes them in. Big floral panels on three sides, drape pooling to the ground, and suddenly the couple is in a very pretty box and the structure has stopped being a chuppah.

What I do instead is keep the flowers on the poles and the top, and keep the sides clear. Flowers climbing the front two poles, heavier at the base, lighter as they go up, and a loose line of greenery along the front edge of the canopy. The cloth on top is often a family tallit, a grandfather’s, sometimes something older than that, and it’s not mine to cover. Ask what the cloth is before you design anything. I’ve had couples hand me a tallit that came through Ellis Island and the only right answer is to build around it and let it show.

Also, some chuppahs are held. Four people, four poles, standing for the whole ceremony. If that’s the plan, the structure can’t weigh what a freestanding one weighs, and the flowers have to be light enough that a cousin can hold a pole for twenty-five minutes without regretting it. That changes the design completely. Ask.

The mandap holds people, and fire

A mandap is a different thing again. Four pillars, a canopy, and a platform underneath it where the couple sits, with the priest, with family, sometimes with a small fire in the middle of all of it. So it’s not a backdrop. It’s a room. People are inside it for an hour or more, which means the flowers are seen from inside as much as from the guests’ seats, and the pillars are what people lean past and reach around and sit next to.

And then there’s the fire. The agni is real, it’s lit, and it’s usually in a small vessel right at the center. Fabric anywhere near it is a bad idea. Anything that drips, sheds, or dangles is a bad idea. Florals on a mandap stay on the pillars and the outer edge of the canopy, and I keep the inside clean. Marigolds hold up to heat and smoke better than most things, which is one reason they’re everywhere in these ceremonies and not just for the color. Roses wilt. Orchids go limp. A florist in Queens who does a lot of these told me years ago to think of the mandap as a kitchen with flowers on the outside, and I’ve never found a better way to say it.

Scale is the other thing. Mandaps are big. The ones I’ve built for weddings out in Long Island or in the bigger halls in Jersey City can run twelve feet across and ten feet tall, and they need to be, because there might be eight people under there. A delicate, airy structure looks lost. Go heavy on the pillars, go bright, and let it be the biggest thing in the room, because it is.

What they have in common

Both structures are places where something happens, not things people walk past. The flowers have to survive bodies moving around them, a photographer leaning in, a grandmother being helped up a step. So everything’s built sturdier than an arch would be, attached better, and tested by someone actually leaning on it before the guests arrive.

Both also tend to get moved, or want to. A freestanding chuppah often becomes the backdrop behind the sweetheart table. A mandap mostly doesn’t move, but its flowers do, and the marigold garlands end up draped along the head table or the entrance. Plan for the second life when you build the first.

The combined ceremony, which is most of my year now

More and more of the weddings I do in the city are two traditions in one day, or one ceremony with a bit of each. A chuppah in the morning, a tea ceremony in the afternoon. A mandap on Saturday, a church on Sunday. Or a single ceremony under a structure that has to be both things at once, which is where the real design work is.

The trick there is to not try to make one structure do two jobs by splitting the difference. A chuppah with mandap-scale florals is a confused chuppah. What works is finding the one element both traditions share, usually the canopy, usually the four posts, and letting the flowers tell the story of whichever tradition is happening at that moment. Light and open for one half, bold and saturated for the other, with a change of florals during the break if there is one. It takes a longer conversation with both families, and most of the Brooklyn wedding florists I respect would tell you that conversation is the job.

Anyway. From Riverdale to Jackson Heights to the synagogues on the Upper West Side and the banquet halls out past the Grand Central Parkway, this city gets married in a lot of languages. The wedding designers in NYC worth hiring are the ones who ask what the structure means before they ask what color the flowers should be.