Katie Hammon, Wedding Planner + Creative Director
Full-service wedding planning and creative direction for destination wedding weekends in Upstate New York.
Life is too short to rush through the moments that matter most.
At The Maples Estate, wedding planning is about more than organizing logistics. It's about creating the conditions for you to be fully present throughout one of the most meaningful weekends of your life.
As your full-service wedding planner and creative director, I'll guide you from our very first conversation through your final send-off, shaping a destination wedding weekend that reflects who you are and gives you the freedom to simply experience it.
Planning should feel different
One of my couples said something recently that perfectly captured why I plan the way I do.
As we were walking through their wedding timeline, they looked at me and smiled. "Wow... you've got this planned down to the minute." Then they laughed. "We don't actually have to think about any of this though, right?"
I said, "No. We think about it now so our team can carry it later."
That conversation sums up my philosophy as a wedding planner. Planning isn't about creating more structure, it's about creating enough structure that you're free to let go of it.
Free to laugh with your friends, actually eat dinner, sneak away for a quiet walk together. Free to live inside your wedding instead of worrying about what's next.
Every wedding begins with getting to know you.
One of the first things I ask couples isn't about flowers or color palettes.
I ask...How do you spend your weekends? What meals do you love to eat? How do you like to celebrate? What feels like home? What traditions matter most to you? Because those answers tell me far more than a Pinterest board ever could.
Those answers become the filter for every decision we make together. They help me understand what belongs, what doesn't, where to push an idea further, and where restraint will make the experience stronger.
As your Hudson Valley wedding planner and creative director, my role isn't to fit your story into someone else's idea of what a wedding should be. It's to help uncover what's already there and thoughtfully shape a destination wedding weekend around it.
Full-Service Wedding Planning at The Maples Estate
Planning begins the moment you book your wedding weekend.
We start by getting to know you. Not just what you want your wedding to look like, but how you spend your time, how you like to celebrate, what matters most to you, and what you want these four days to feel like.
From there, I'll help you establish your priorities and investment, shape the experience, develop the creative direction, and curate a vendor team that can bring it all to life.
Together, we'll move through:
01. YOUR VISION + PRIORITIES
We start with the big picture: who you are, what matters most, and how you want the weekend to feel.
02. YOUR INVESTMENT
I'll build an investment plan around those priorities and help you understand where spending meaningfully changes the experience, where it doesn't, and how each decision affects the whole.
03. YOUR VENDOR TEAM
Rather than handing you a preferred vendor list, I'll curate options around your style, priorities, investment, and desired level of service, then guide you through proposals, conversations, and selections.
04. YOUR CREATIVE DIRECTION
We'll translate everything we've learned into the visual and experiential details of your weekend, from layouts, florals, lighting, rentals, and tabletop to the way each event feels and flows.
05. YOUR WEEKEND
We'll bring it all together through timelines, floor plans, guest logistics, vendor communication, rehearsals, production, and every transition happening behind the scenes.
My role isn't to give you more decisions to make. It's to understand what matters to you, narrow the possibilities, make thoughtful recommendations, and guide you toward the choices that will have the greatest impact.
When your wedding weekend arrives, my team and I carry the plan we've built together so you don't have to. You get to live it.
Why four days?
Because meaningful celebrations need time. Four days gives us room not only to plan the wedding itself, but to think about the entire experience surrounding it, from the moment your closest people arrive through the final goodbye.
“Multiple vendors told us it was the best-managed wedding they’d ever worked. The attention to detail and seamless communication ensured everything ran smoothly without us needing to worry about anything.”
— Rachel + Nick, The Maples Estate Clients
Meet Your Planner + Creative Director
Personally Planned + Creatively Directed by Katie Hammon, Founder of The Maples Estate and your Hudson Valley wedding planner and creative director.
I've spent nearly two decades producing experiences, from intimate celebrations to concerts, festivals, conferences and large-scale public events for thousands of people. That background taught me to think simultaneously about creative direction, logistics, hospitality, pacing, production and the way people actually move through an experience.
The longer I do this, the more I'm convinced my work isn't just about planning weddings. It's about creating the conditions for people to live inside the moments that matter most.
That's why couples often tell me that they will miss our monthly planning calls after their wedding. Not because planning is fun by default, but because they felt held, supported and understood.
If we work together, my hope isn't simply that you'll have a beautiful wedding, it's that you'll leave feeling like you were fully present for every part of it.
Investing in what matters.
Your wedding investment should reflect your priorities, not someone else's idea of what a wedding needs to include.
Part of my job is helping you understand the tradeoffs behind each decision. Where does additional investment meaningfully change the experience? Where doesn't it? What deserves more of your resources because it matters deeply to you, and where can we intentionally simplify?
Good planning isn't about finding more things to spend money on. It's about knowing which things are worth spending it on.
A little about how I got here.
When the weekend arrives, the planning should disappear.
By then, we've made the decisions. We've built the team. We've thought through the timeline, the weather, the guest experience, the transitions, and all the tiny details you shouldn't have to carry.
Your job is no longer to plan your wedding. It's to wake up in a house full of people you love, get married, eat something incredible, dance your ass off, sneak away together for a minute, sit around the fire a little longer than you planned and actually remember what it felt like.
We'll take it from here.