Backyard Bash

Matt soon moved into town to join Sophie. She grew up in Te Tihi-o-Maru Timaru, while Matt divided his time between his parents’ homes, enjoying regular weekends at his dad’s Pleasant Point farm. “We liked the same things. He was really outgoing, and I’m slightly more reserved, so it pushed me. It evolved so easily, because we’d already become friends before we got intimately involved,” Sophie explains. After five years together, Matt proposed while they were holidaying with friends in Ōmarama. “Ōmarama is very special to me and my family,” says Sophie. “It is where my grandparents lived, and where we spent every summer and Christmas growing up.” They went out by boat into the gorge, and Matt found a lovely beach and dropped to one knee. “I can tell he didn’t get any woman’s opinions on this proposal, because there was nothing in the boat to celebrate with afterwards,” Sophie says. “No celebratory drinks – only one warm beer and two fishing rods, so the boys proceeded to fish before we went home to celebrate!”

Initially, Sophie envisaged a low key backyard bash – a cook-up with their loved ones on Matt’s family farm, where they love to spend time. “It’s all hills and valleys. It’s gorgeous out there,” says Sophie. Then Sophie realised she would be the first of all her cousins to marry, which meant the standard backyard bash mightn’t cut it. “It was quite special, ours being the first family wedding of my generation,” she reflects. “It ended up being this big, glamorous event! It was so fantastic, but it’s funny how it started evolving so quickly!” Sophie urged Matt to kickstart the ceremony with a fun entrance, so he drove in on the back of Sophie’s cousin’s truck. “I wanted Matt to feel just as special as me, because it’s about both of us,” she says. Then followed heartfelt words they’d each prepared separately. “I thought, when people got married, they were adults,” says Sophie. “And actually, it was just a really fun, big, silly party that had all the people that we wanted there.”

Marriage hasn’t changed Matt and Sophie’s day-to-day life – they’d already set up house and adopted two dogs. “But it just feels nice,” says Sophie. Matt works big hours as a builder, then comes home and launches straight into renovations on their second home. Sophie works as an interior designer with her mother Karen, who owns Guthrie Bowron Timaru. Sophie is also in charge of decorating their home. “And I try to build,” she adds. “He sometimes lets me give it a go!” They’d love their next home to be a new build on a four hectare parcel of land on the Pleasant Point farm, especially as Sophie is now pregnant with their first child, due in July 2025. “It’s quite storybook, which sounds so cliché,” says Sophie, “but it’s just the way it’s happened. Nothing was planned. It just seems to have panned out in a perfect kind of way.”