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When Peter Vidani and Jennifer Pierce attended an open house in September for a townhouse in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, a few blocks east of Fort Greene Park, Mr. Vidani felt like the couple — who had relocated from California at the beginning of the year — had found their dream home.
Ms. Pierce, though, said she “needed a little more time to say, ‘Yes, let’s go for it.’”
She came around soon enough: six days after first seeing it, they put in an offer. Then came a bidding war, which they lost.
“We had to tell ourselves it wasn’t meant to be,” Mr. Vidani said.
But when the sellers’ listing agent later returned to the couple’s listing agent with an update that the other deal had fallen through, “it was hard to not think in a romantic way that it was meant to be,” he said. They put in another offer, which was accepted in September. (The sale is currently closing.)
On Nov. 12, Mr. Vidani, 35, and Ms. Pierce, 33, who became in engaged in May, celebrated the almost-finalized purchase of their new home by getting married in it. Given that neither grew up in New York — he is from Wisconsin, she is from California — Mr. Vidani said it was the only place they could think of “that was special enough to have meaning.”
They wed in the parlor, surrounded by their parents and Mr. Vidani’s brother, who served as the witness. Celine Eid of Honeybreak Officiants, who was ordained by the Universal Life Church, officiated. Also in attendance was a colleague of the sellers’ listing agent, who had to let everyone inside.
Afterward, the newlyweds shared a Champagne toast with their guests and gave them a tour of the house, still staged with furniture for showings. One of the sellers of the home, a painter, left the couple a wedding gift, they said: a black-and-white watercolor print of a flame in a candle. (They plan to hang it in the entryway.)
Dinner with their guests at Gramercy Tavern followed, as did a stay at the Ludlow Hotel in Manhattan.
While the couple’s house hunting had a rocky start, their relationship did not.
Mr. Vidani and Ms. Pierce met around Thanksgiving 2018, through the dating app Hinge. Her profile noted she was looking for a partner who, among other things, is funny and laughs a lot. She realized they had a shared sense of humor by their second date, on which they spent six hours wandering the city of Oakland, Calif. (Ms. Pierce was living in Berkeley at the time, and Mr. Vidani in San Francisco.)
“Peter’s just so funny and he was cracking me up,” Ms. Pierce said. “We have a light way of looking at the world.”
But Ms. Pierce, who received bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and works as an attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency, also has a serious side, which Mr. Vidani said complements his “off-the-cuff” personality.
“Jenny is a much more organized person in general,” said Mr. Vidani, who dropped out of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to co-found Tumblr and now works as a senior vice president at Salesforce.
By January 2019, they made their relationship official. In February 2020, Ms. Pierce moved into Mr. Vidani’s San Francisco home, weeks before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
“It was a huge challenge to navigate a changed world, and I was so grateful to be with Peter,” Ms. Pierce said.
Wanting to try something new, the couple moved to New York in January, into a rental a few blocks from the home they will soon own.
Their new home, the couple said, will hopefully be a long-term one where they’ll raise a family — and, one day, tell their children the story of how they married in the parlor.
“Maybe there will be a picture of it in there,” Mr. Vidani said.
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