From Bali to a Decaying Mexican Convent: Farihin & Ryder's Wedding at Ex Convento Desierto de los Leones

Love Story

"We met while both on vacation in Bali. We decided to move there after our third date and it all worked out." Three years, several countries, and one wedding in a Mexican forest later it still works.
Farihin holds a graduate degree in neuroscience and runs a mental health centre. Ryder is an artist and designer. They are not, by any conventional measure, people who do things the expected way. The proposal came at sunset on the black sand beach in Bali where they first met. A Hindu water temple was behind them, flowers covered a stretch of sand in front, and Farihin was unprepared because they were leaving for Japan the next morning and she hadn't wanted to go out that evening. She went anyway. It turned out to be a good decision.

About Your Wedding

One hundred guests, seven months of planning, and a venue that did the heavy lifting before a single floral arrangement was placed. The concept was moody, romantic, and botanical. The wedding was designed not to be beautiful in the conventional sense but to feel like something else entirely. The color palette featured leafy greens and earthy grey tones, chosen to blur the line between decoration and the forest itself. Everything was meant to feel like an extension of what was already growing there.
What Farihin remembers most clearly is the first moment she walked into the venue after all the guests arrived. "Seeing a space filled with people who had flown in from all over the world just to celebrate us was wonderful," she says. "I used to think weddings were overrated, but being surrounded by everyone you love, all there to celebrate your love, is truly one of the best feelings in the world." The single feeling she wanted guests to leave with was mystified. By all accounts, they were.

Morning Details

The morning began at La Valise CDMX, before the forest took over.
The invitations were designed by Ryder himself. An artist handling his own wedding stationery is a detail that only makes sense once you know who he is. The rings were Tiffany, chosen deliberately. Ryder wanted an iconic American brand, and the choice carried the quiet intentionality that ran through every decision they made. La Valise set the tone. It is a boutique hotel with a considered aesthetic that suits a couple who think carefully about every surface they inhabit. The morning was unhurried, personal, and in keeping with the day ahead.

Bride Getting Ready

The dress was Vivienne Westwood, found in Los Angeles just weeks before the wedding after a search that took Farihin across Asia and Europe over months. "I eventually found the dress in Los Angeles just weeks before the wedding, so the process ended up very last minute," she recalls. What made the story stranger and more memorable was what happened next. When the LA fires broke out three weeks before the wedding, the dress was the first thing she packed. Getting ready at La Valise CDMX, with the city still ahead and the forest further still, the Vivienne Westwood was finally exactly where it was supposed to be.

Groom Getting Ready

While Farihin readied herself at La Valise with Vivienne Westwood in its rightful place, Ryder prepared quietly, with the calm that belongs to people who spend their lives making things rather than talking about them. An artist and designer by nature, he had already put his mark on the day before it began. The invitations were his work, the aesthetic vision partly his instinct. Getting ready was the last quiet hour before a forest convent in the hills outside Mexico City absorbed everything else.

Photoshoot Before The Ceremony

Two locations, one mood: a boutique hotel and a forest convent, both exactly right. La Valise provided the contained elegance of a Mexico City morning. Ex Convento Desierto de los Leones provided everything else. The light inside the convent grounds moves differently than in the city, filtered through old growth trees and interrupted by stone walls crumbling at their own pace for centuries. The shift between the two was not jarring but deliberate, a transition from one world into another, which had been the point of the whole day from the start.

Ceremony

Ex Convento Desierto de los Leones is a 17th-century former monastery set inside a protected forest reserve on the outskirts of Mexico City, and it carries the particular atmosphere of somewhere that has been many things and is still becoming something else. The ceremony happened here, inside the ruins and beneath the trees, with the forest pressing in from every direction.
She walked down the aisle to Ariel Pink performing an acoustic version of “Baby Live" - the kind of moment you can't plan twice. The choice of song, the choice of artist, the choice of having him there in person rather than a playlist - all of it was exactly in keeping with a couple who had never particularly done anything the straightforward way. The ceremony unfolded in the same spirit: intimate, specific, and entirely their own.

About Photoshoot after the ceremony

Wedding Venue & Decor

A 17th-century convent swallowed by forest on the outskirts of Mexico City. The hauntingly beautiful forest and the decaying building were, as Farihin puts it, the inspiration themselves - not a backdrop to be decorated around but the thing the wedding was built to honor. Leafy greens and earthy grey tones ran throughout, chosen to feel like an extension of what was already growing outside the walls rather than something imposed upon it.
The result was exactly what they intended: a space that felt like stepping into a different world. The event flow and transitions, how the music, layout, and rhythm of the evening guided guests from one moment to the next, mattered more than anyone anticipated. "Events are living, breathing things," Farihin notes. "They move through time and space, and creating a beautiful experience requires careful attention to rhythm, energy, and how people naturally move and feel within a space." That attention showed.

Reception

Ariel Pink performed again at the reception, the forest still surrounding everything outside the walls. Their first dance was to his version of the Beach Boys' God Only Knows - a song that is already almost impossibly romantic, made more so by the fact that it was performed live, in a former monastery, by the artist himself. The guests who had flown in from across the world for exactly this kind of evening got exactly what they came for.
"As a Malaysian and an American planning a wedding in Mexico while living in Bali, the whole thing sounds a little crazy in retrospect, but Lupita and her team made the entire process feel seamless and genuinely enjoyable." The food, decorations, and location: everything Farihin says she would repeat exactly the same way. There is not much higher praise than that.
"Being surrounded by everyone you love, all there to celebrate your love, is truly one of the best feelings in the world."