Black Details, Two Horses, and a Bride Who Planned It All Herself: Andreea & Bela's Wedding at Issa Resort
- Author: Natali Grace Levine
- Wedding date: 08/08/2026
- City: Bucharest
Love Story
Some love stories begin with a spark. This one began with a firm no. Andreea and Bela met through volleyball in the autumn of 2021: he plays professionally, she had played for years before stepping away from the game, and the sport had long ago given them the same circle of friends. The problem was the math. Andreea is eight years older, and Bela was 20 at the time, a few weeks short of his 21st birthday. She admits with a smile that at first “all I could think was, ‘He’s way too young for me.’” Bela, as it turned out, was not easily discouraged. A few more meetings followed, then a few more, and somewhere along the way the objection quietly lost its force. What started as serious doubt became the most natural thing in the world, and five years on, the couple says they only understand each other better with every year.
Their life together is built around a timeline most couples never have to think about. A career in professional sport has an expiry date, and Andreea and Bela have made a clear decision to live this chapter fully while it lasts. She runs her own small business remotely, so when volleyball moves Bela to a new city, her office moves with him as a laptop and a Wi-Fi password. Their downtime runs on the same principle of balance: long trips, new restaurants and nights out on one side, entire days of doing absolutely nothing at home on the other. By their own admission, they are very good at both extremes.
The proposal arrived precisely when Andreea had stopped looking for it. For a long time she had pictured it on every trip and every special occasion, until she decided to let the idea go. In September 2025, just before Bela’s training season began in Trento, the two escaped to the Dolomites. One evening he announced a dinner reservation and refused to say where. The destination was Yera at FORESTIS, a restaurant Andreea had been talking about for ages, and she was far too excited about the table to wonder about anything else. Midway through dinner, she brought up an athlete who had proposed to his girlfriend in a restaurant, and reminded Bela that he had always called restaurant proposals not special enough. Maybe, she teased, a place like this would be the exception. It was. Moments later Bela stood up, walked around the table and asked her to marry him. After months of guessing, Andreea was caught completely off guard, and the proposal turned out to be quiet, private, and entirely theirs.
About Your Wedding
On August 8, 2026, the couple celebrated at Issa Resort in Turda, in Romania’s Cluj County, with 250 guests. The wedding took ten months to plan, and the bride made nearly every decision herself, most of them from Italy. Remarkably, she describes the process as a pleasure rather than a burden. The only real logistical puzzle was accommodation: with so many guests traveling in, finding everyone a bed took more coordination than any aesthetic choice.
The aesthetic, meanwhile, had been in development for about a decade. That is roughly how long Andreea has kept a Pinterest board simply titled “Wedding,” though it never added up to one finished picture. Two rules, however, were never up for debate: plain white candles on the tables, and one dominant color. As the bride puts it, “I had always been absolutely sure about one thing: black.” It’s an unusual choice for a wedding palette, and a risky one, since black can easily tip into heaviness. Here it never did, largely because Andreea treated it with restraint. The brief she set herself was clear: she wanted the wedding “to feel simple, classic and modern, but never plain.” That meant a celebration with strong character that still left room for the venue to speak, and, above all, a day guests would remember as something genuinely different.
Then came the plot twist every self-planning bride should hear about. By Friday, everything that could be decided had been decided, and Andreea officially “closed shop.” With detailed instructions in hand, she put the rest in the hands of the venue coordinator and the team responsible for décor and flowers. Looking back, she is convinced that “being able to relax, stop making decisions and simply enjoy our wedding ended up being more valuable than any little detail.”
Morning Details
If this wedding has a signature, it belongs to the bride. Andreea designed the invitations in two formats: a digital version for friends and younger guests, and a printed one for family and older relatives. The menus were hers too, printed by a local studio, as were the concepts behind the seating chart, the photo corner, and the civil ceremony setup with its black draped backdrop. Each began as a collection of Pinterest references that she reshaped and combined until they no longer looked borrowed, and the décor team turned them into the real thing. The favors carried the same handwriting: small silver coins that Andreea turned into magnets, boxed individually and finished with a personalized design she put together herself from elements sourced online.
The rings tell a quieter story. Bought in Italy, they are simple, clean, and classic, with nothing intended to impress. That is precisely their point: in Andreea’s words, they simply feel like the two of them. Jewelry followed the same philosophy. With two detailed, sparkling dresses to wear, the bride chose not to add any competition and kept to a pair of small, delicate earrings.
Bride Getting Ready
Andreea’s getting-ready plan came with one strict condition: nothing staged. She and her closest friends got ready together in the couple’s room at the venue, while the photographer was asked to document whatever unfolded rather than direct it. What she wanted, she recalls laughing, was “someone running around with her hair done but no make-up yet, the little chaos, all of it” — and that is precisely what she got. The bride suspects there isn’t a single proper photo of all her girls together, and considers that a success. Behind the chaos, two professionals kept the morning moving. Hairstylist Denisa Sas styled the bride along with six of her friends, and make-up artist Ariana Birtie worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., completing looks for no fewer than eleven women. Andreea calls her an absolute hero, and the numbers make it hard to disagree.
The dresses were a lesson in persistence. “Choosing the style wasn’t the hard part,” Andreea says, “finding the dresses was.” For her first look, she wanted lace and long sleeves. The dress from her imagination never materialized, but at Selen Boutique in Cluj she found one that did something better: its sleeves and choker were detachable, allowing the look to evolve as the day went on. The second dress took even longer to find. Andreea knew exactly which design she wanted, but finding where to buy it took considerable detective work, and it eventually arrived from a boutique in Vietnam. Both, she insists, justified every hour spent looking.
Everything around the dresses was deliberately understated. The veil and shoes came from a small online shop, chosen because they suited the gown rather than for any label. Having invested seriously in the dresses, Andreea saw no reason to spend a fortune on pieces destined for a single wear, and the balance shows in the final look. The bouquet was settled long before anything else: white roses, matching the ones on the tables, tied with a black ribbon. Anything else would have been off-brand. Ela Lavu Floral Studio created it.
Groom Getting Ready
If the bride’s morning was a full production, the groom’s was a pool day. Where Andreea’s room held a hairstylist, a make-up artist and a steady queue of eleven women, Bela and the groomsmen had considerably less on their schedule. They spent the morning by the resort pool, leaving the real preparations for later, when they moved to the godparents’ room at the venue to get dressed. Bela’s tuxedo was custom-made by Royal Craus, a tailor based in Cluj, which means it was cut for him rather than chosen off a rail. It also echoes the bride’s choices: while much of the wedding was planned from Italy, both her first dress and his tuxedo came from Cluj. The contrast between the two mornings was stark, and it suited the couple perfectly: one side meticulous, the other entirely at ease.
Photoshoot Before The Ceremony
The stables didn’t stop at the first look. Determined to make the most of the horses at the venue, the couple stayed there for their portraits, and the resort provided “two absolutely beautiful horses — one black and one white,” a pairing that, in the bride’s words, “couldn’t have been more perfect for us.” For a wedding built around black and white, the coincidence is almost too neat. The same pairing already ran through the seating chart, the tables and the photo booth, and now it appeared again in the most unexpected place. It is also a reminder that the strongest details are not always the ones planned furthest in advance. Some simply arrive on the day and fit perfectly.
Ceremony
No altar, no chapel, and no rituals kept out of habit: the ceremony took place outdoors on the resort’s lawn, framed by a black draped backdrop. The concept for the setup was Andreea’s, developed like so many other details from her own references, and the décor team built it on site. Against the green grass, the black fabric framed the couple boldly and carried the wedding’s signature color into its central moment. The bride walked down the aisle to “Lover” by Taylor Swift. They deliberately left out traditional customs, and Andreea explains the reasoning simply: “We wanted the day to feel completely like us, so we kept only the things that genuinely meant something to us.” That kind of editing takes more conviction than simply following a program, and it gave the ceremony a clarity that suited the couple. Every element was there for a reason, and the result was simple, intimate, and entirely personal.
Wedding Venue & Decor
The venue was discovered the modern way: by accident, several clicks deep. Issa Resort had been open for only about two months when Andreea found it while moving from one photographer’s Instagram to another, then on to florists and décor accounts. “Somehow, that little Instagram rabbit hole led me to the venue,” she remembers, “and the moment I saw it, I knew we had to consider it.” For a weekend-long celebration, the resort offered everything the couple needed in one place: a beautiful setting, rooms for guests, food the couple still praises, a pool and, as it turned out, stables with horses. With a venue that strong, Andreea’s priority was never to decorate over it, only to give it personality.
That personality was black. It ran through the seating chart, the photo backdrop, and a black-and-white photo booth - the one idea that didn’t come from Pinterest: Andreea saw it at a party on a reality TV show and adopted it on the spot. For her, black has always been the ideal color because it is simple and classic yet still makes a statement, and at Issa Resort it was paired almost exclusively with white. The tables were strikingly pared back, with white candles and a few single roses in plain glass vases, the same white roses that formed the bouquet. The menus, designed by the bride, completed the picture. The effect was elegant with an edge, far from the typical wedding reception, and the discipline behind it is what made it work. Lavinia Berghian brought the décor to life, with florals by Ela Lavu Floral Studio.
Couple's Advice
“Trust the team and let yourself enjoy the experience. They genuinely take care of everything and make sure the day runs exactly as it should, so you can simply be present and enjoy it. The venue itself is exceptional — from the setting and rooms to the food and pool — but the people behind it are what truly allow you to relax.”
Reception
Ask Andreea for the moment she’ll carry with her, and she skips the vows and the dresses and goes straight to the dance floor. The first dance opened the party, set to “You’re Still the One” by Shania Twain, a song the couple had claimed for this moment long before there was a ring involved. Standing in the middle of their friends, with all that energy around them, felt like the real beginning of the celebration, and it never lost momentum afterward. DJs Lucian Barbulescu and Stan Adrian kept the dance floor full, MC Deeix steered the evening, and Paula Ola provided the wedding cake. The bride gave credit to the whole team, saying that “everything came together exactly as we had imagined, and each vendor understood what we wanted and brought it to life beautifully.” Sirizo Photography documented the weekend with the unposed honesty the couple had asked for, while Metanoia Studio captured it on film.
And it was a weekend, not an evening. The celebration stretched across three days and three nights, and the bride’s own summary beats anything an editor could write. “We basically celebrated for three days and three nights, and it felt like the best school trip ever,” Andreea laughs, with one small difference: everyone was a grown-up, and one of them happened to be getting married. Asked what they would change, the couple has a one-word answer: nothing. Given the chance, they would relive those three days exactly as they were, again and again.
Wedding Team
- Photographer SIRIZO
- Wedding Planner @aandreea.mat
- Videographer @metanoiastudio.ro
- Florist @ela.lavu.floralstudio
- Décor @laviniaberghian
- Bride's Dress Selen Boutique
- Groom's Tuxedo @royalcraus_suits
- Hair @denisasas.hairartist
- Make-up @mak_eupbyari
- Cake @paula.ola.official
- DJ @lucianbarbulescu @djstanadrian
- MC @deeixtheartist
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