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Field Notes

The Smaller, Cheaper, Just-for-Us Wedding

Tatyana Lapson and her husband, Michael, had their ceremony in a beer garden in Queens.

RUBY DEE PHILIPPA’s first wedding took place in 2000. It was elaborate, so much so that she estimated that her in-laws spent several thousand dollars on flowers alone. The marriage, she said, lasted less than a year.

So when the time came to do it again, Ms. Philippa, 47, a former restaurant owner, author of “Ruby’s Juke Joint Americana Cookbook” and lead singer in the rockabilly band Ruby Dee and the Snakehandlers, went in the other direction. She and Jorge Harada, 43, a librarian and guitarist for the group, went to a justice of the peace one Friday in April 2011.

And for the reception? The couple gave a barbecue the next day in their backyard in Austin, Tex. Invitations went out via Evite. Guests brought the food, drinks, dishes, grills, pillows and chairs.

“It was a picnic, really,” Ms. Philippa said. “No one had to dress up. They could come in shorts or they could put on nice clothes.”

More than a decade after the term “bridezilla” entered the lexicon, two years after the wedding of Chelsea Clinton set her parents back by an estimated $2 million to $5 million, almost a year after Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries spent a rumored $10 million to celebrate what turned out to be a mere 10 weeks of marriage, and even as shows like “Say Yes to the Dress” remain popular, a small but growing number of brides and grooms are opting to downsize.

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Credit...Gwenda Kaczor

The lower-key wedding, if still a bit unexpected, is having a moment, thanks in no small part to May’s surprise backyard wedding of the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, with fewer than 100 guests and catering from two local restaurants in Palo Alto, Calif.

Turning to everything from public parks to the living rooms of friends and family, couples are recreating the traditional wedding one ceremony at a time.

Over at the wedding site Offbeatbride.com, the publisher, Ariel M. Stallings, said the number of visitors to her Simple Wedding archive has grown since the Zuckerberg-Chan event from 275 hits a week to more than 600.

The Wedding Report, a market research firm, has been tracking the change, noting that in the last year, couples participating in the company’s surveys have increasingly reported a desire for “fun, romantic, simple, casual and unique weddings.”

Vendors concur.

“The backyard is the new ballroom,” said Amy Kaneko, an events planner in San Francisco.

Stacy Scott, a caterer in Marin County, Calif., added, “I think people are waking up to the insanity that is the wedding market.”

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Rosa Brooks married Joseph Mouer in her backyard in Alexandria, Va.Credit...Jodi Johnson

The experts say these more-intimate and often lower-cost affairs have been brought about by the intersection of a number of trends.

First is the relentlessly downbeat economy. The average wedding now costs more than $27,000, according to TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com, with costs running significantly higher in regions like the Bay Area and New York City. But homespun celebrations come with substantially lower price tags.

Second is the ages of brides and grooms, now at record highs of 26.5 for women and 28.5 for men. Couples often find themselves coordinating their special day in the midst of other work and family commitments.

“We are busy and we have jobs,” said Rosa Brooks, 42, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who married Lt. Col. Joseph Mouer, 44, in her backyard in Alexandria, Va., on June 15. The planning took all of two weeks, and included asking the bride’s mother, the journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, to handle the catering, which was done by calling a restaurant, the Lebanese Taverna.

The couple had 14 family members in attendance — 16 if you count Ms. Brooks’s hound-lab mix, Zoe, and her father’s golden retriever. Play equipment and soccer balls belonging to Ms. Brooks’s daughters, Anna, 10, and Clara, 7, are in the background in photos.

“For us, it was like a dinner party, but with a ring and someone to marry you,” Ms. Brooks said.

Katie Schneiber, 28, was on vacation in Paris this last April when Russell Hill, 31, her boyfriend of five months, flew over with a surprise proposal. Ms. Schneiber ecstatically said yes, and then recalled that she needed to move to the Washington area within two months, since she was to begin a residency in psychiatry at George Washington University in July.

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Ruby Dee Philippa and Jorge Harada went the justice of the peace route.

Instead of planning an elaborate wedding while Ms. Schneiber was in the midst of a grueling work schedule, the couple decided to marry before it began. Family friends from New Canaan, Conn., where she grew up, offered the couple the use of their backyard. There was no time to order bridesmaid dresses, so Ms. Schneiber instructed the 10 friends she asked to stand with her to wear navy dresses with coral colored shawls she found online at Urban Outfitters for $18.

Rather than holding one giant event, Ms. Schneiber and Mr. Hill married in a small ceremony in a Mormon temple in New York City on June 2. They then headed to New Canaan, where they had a party for 150 friends; a number of guests (not to mention the bride and groom) changed into bathing suits and jumped into the pool.

The total cost: $6,000, a sum that did not include a second party Mr. Hill’s family gave near their Utah home in July, which included a chili cook-off and square dancing, as a tribute to Mr. Hill’s late father, who was an amateur square-dance caller.

All of this points to another trend that those in the business say is influencing the new wedding culture. Millennials want to do it their way, and that preference is affecting the ceremonies of all brides and grooms, no matter their ages.

According to business experts, even at fancier, fussier and more formal weddings, rustic barns are now favored over traditional catering halls, while wildflowers often supplant roses as centerpieces.

“It’s just a shift in taste,” Ms. Kaneko said.

Some people are so determined to buck the expectation that a wedding is an event that they neglect to inform their guests (à la Zuckerberg and Chan) that the party they have been invited to is going to include a ceremony.

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Katie Schneiber and Russell Hill married in friends’ backyard. Bridesmaids’ scarves were found online for $18.Credit...Megan Huet

The surprise wedding, planners say, is a way of avoiding everything from drawn-out planning to making sure friends and family do not stress out about gifts, dress codes or other traditional wedding flash points.

“There is a real focus on the guest experience right now, and this is the ultimate for a guest,” said Rebecca Dolgin, executive editor of TheKnot.

That was the tack taken by Mickey and Cassie Luckoff. The couple, who married in 2010, surprised the guests who came to their Marin County home for a gathering the Saturday after Thanksgiving by announcing that they were about to witness an exchange of vows.

“I like to do the unexpected,” said Ms. Luckoff, 60.

Her husband, 76, added, “The only clue we provided was a silver balloon at the front door.”

The new approach also includes no small amount of assist from online crafts sites. Tatyana Lapson, 30, who married her husband Michael, 31, last August in an outdoor ceremony at Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens, was one such bride, buying banners that said “love” on the Web site Etsy to decorate trees.

For her bouquet, she went to the flower district in Manhattan and put it together herself, tying it with a piece of lace. Total wedding cost: less than $2,500.

And why was the venue chosen?

“That’s a place we like to go to,” Ms. Lapson said. “One night we were having dinner there and we just thought, ‘Let’s hold our wedding here.’ ”

After all, as Ms. Kaneko observed, “No one thinks about their personality and says, ‘Stephanie: hotel ballroom.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section ST, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Smaller, Cheaper, Just-for-Us Wedding. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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