When Los Altos Hills native Anna Bavor (now Anna Smith) started planning her wedding to Bryan Smith, their shared world of ranches and rodeos defined the setting and its aesthetic.
They both work in livestock, now living in Byron and raising commercial beef in the East Bay Hills – if you’ve ever spotted cattle grazing nearby as you went for a hike, you’ve gotten a glimpse of how their beef gets raised.
Their venue, the hay barn at Fox Haven Ranch in Byron, captured Bavor’s belief that “barns are beautiful works of art” – and those not actively housing livestock make comfortable venues.
Barns were in her blood – Bavor grew up riding out of the barn at Fremont Hills Country Club and volunteered with Westwind Barn’s program for young people with disabilities.
The groomsmen wore custom-made cowboy hats, guests who were local ranchers added their brands to a barn door set to be installed in the couple’s home, and Bavor wore bridal boots in a practical brown because she plans to keep wearing them after the wedding. The hats are designed with that intent too – Bavor first connected with Greeley Hat Works during her tenure as “Miss Rodeo Nevada” back in the day, and she got hat measurements and shape preferences for all the groomsmen knowing that as ranchers, they’d be wearing them in the workplace, too – if she got it right.
“That’s a big cowboy thing – I can look across a field and based on hat shape, I can tell who’s riding towards me. It’s a very personal thing,” she explained.
The aesthetic was deeply tied to their discipline – Bavor wears a cowboy hat when she’s working cattle or branding calves, not just in the context of a wedding. The “guestbook” of brands burned into their door represents the registered, unique marks of their friends’ cattle enterprises. And Bavor and Smith debuted their own, new brand at the wedding, for that day and cattle-raising into the future.
