Golden Beginning

Lawton Cooper Ginn is a girl who’s always known what she wants, including the timing of her wedding. “Ever since I was five,” she says, “I’ve wanted to get married in November.” So when high school sweetheart Eric Yon proposed at her childhood home on Queen Street two weeks after she graduated from the College of Charleston, Lawton never second-guessed autumnal nuptials. As the daughter of Ginn Resorts owner Edward Robert Ginn, III, she could have wed at any number of luxury properties from Vermont to the Bahamas, but Lawton already had the perfect city picked out. “I’m a Charleston girl at heart,” she says. “I could never get married anywhere else.” With her mother’s house across the street from the circa-1845 French Huguenot Church, the ceremony location was a given. And with two ministers—one of whom was Eric’s brother-in-law—presiding over the “I dos,” she says “it was so intimate and personal.” Afterward, guests made their way to the Carolina Yacht Club where Soirée’s Tara Guérard and Kate Badger Little had spent a week transforming the South Property into a vision of ivory, gold, and plum. When all was said and done, Lawton and Eric, along with their 300-plus guests, were welcomed into a series of elegant chambers: first came a cocktail lounge, next a romantic dining room, and last, a secret late-night “club” that everyone first learned of over dinner. “They couldn’t have done it any better,” says Lawton. “It was exactly what I wanted.”