GAEA.DESIGN

GAEA.DESIGN states its capacity in one blunt line on its own homepage: "We take on a maximum of ten celebrations a year." That's a hard cap, stated as policy, not a soft "we keep our calendar limited" hedge, and it caps itself at 10, a boutique number rather than a raw figure meant to impress. The sentence right before it makes a second, equally direct claim: "Italian, German, English and Portuguese are spoken within our team, so nothing about your celebration passes through translation." Those 2 claims sit side by side on the homepage, and they travel together elsewhere on the site too. A case study for a wedding at Beau-Rivage Palace in Lausanne extends the same list of languages and adds, word for word, "none of it passes through translation," this time in a paragraph about staffing an entire wedding team, down to the photographer and every supplier, with women only, for a religious ceremony held among women alone. The same sentence appearing on 2 separate pages, in almost the same words, reads less like a marketing line and more like a policy someone actually enforces when a booking calls for it.

The location on file for this listing named only Switzerland and Portugal. That is half the map. GAEA Events GmbH, the legal entity behind the brand, is registered at Allmendstrasse 17, 3014 Bern, per its own imprint, which names Tamara Schindler and Tiziana Gouveia as the people behind it. Italy is not an afterthought either: it gets its own navigation page, its own regional FAQ and its own budget guide, on equal footing with Switzerland and Portugal. One homepage FAQ answer widens the published scope further still, naming "Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, Germany and selected European destinations" as places GAEA specializes in. 3 countries carry dedicated pages and a visible portfolio, Switzerland, Italy and Portugal; Germany shows up in that one line and nowhere else checked here.

This is the planning side of a business that also runs its own floristry, not the reverse. Every page title on the site calls it a wedding planner. The main navigation puts weddings and planning first and lists floral design as one item under that heading, not the other way round. And the FAQ answer to "What services does GAEA.DESIGN offer?" opens with "GAEA.DESIGN offers full-service wedding planning, event design, styling and in-house floristry for luxury weddings and private celebrations," floristry named last on a list of 4 disciplines rather than the whole identity of the business. The flowers are real, and they show up in every case study below, but they ride inside the planning relationship. A couple who wants flowers alone, without anyone running the wedding itself, is not who this page is written for.

Tamara and Tiziana run the business together as owners and creative directors, and the site is specific about how that cross-border arrangement actually works: "GAEA.DESIGN is uniquely positioned between Switzerland and Portugal. Tamara is based in Switzerland and Tiziana lives in Portugal, giving our clients direct access to local knowledge, trusted relationships and cultural insight in both destinations." Between them, the about page states "more than 10 years of experience" building events, weddings and commercial campaigns, describing careers that started in Switzerland before extending abroad.

One FAQ answer, and the case studies that don't all match it

The FAQ page describes a single product. Asked what full-service wedding planning includes, the site answers that it "encompasses every aspect of the celebration, from the initial concept to the final execution," running through venue selection, budget management, vendor sourcing, design and timeline, with GAEA positioned as "the central point of contact." Read only that answer and every booking sounds identical. The 4 dated, guest-counted case studies GAEA publishes say otherwise. At Beau-Rivage Palace, a wedding for 150 guests, the write-up states plainly: "Conception, design, decoration, stationery and the full planning of the day were ours." At Gstaad Palace, a wedding for 80 guests got the same full scope, planning included. A second Gstaad Palace wedding on the very same page, for 160 guests, ran differently: "Planning for this celebration was in other hands. Conception, design, floral design and stationery were ours." Somebody else planned that wedding; GAEA designed it, ran the florals and wrote the stationery. At La Posta Vecchia near Rome, a wedding for 60 guests, the split moved the other direction: "Planning, design, coordination and styling were ours; the flowers came from our Italian partner," the one case study here where the in-house floristry the FAQ promises did not happen, because the florals went to a local partner instead.

So the site's own record shows at least 3 distinct shapes of engagement sitting behind one advertised "full-service" answer: full planning with everything in-house, design and floristry without the planning, and planning with the floral piece handed to a partner. None of these gets a name on the services page. There is no published menu separating full planning from partial planning from a design-only tier the way some planners in this category lay out explicitly. What a couple actually receives looks like something worked out project by project rather than picked off a list.

What a couple is asked to budget, not what GAEA charges to plan it

Across the services page, the about page and both country FAQs, GAEA never states a percentage, a flat planning fee, an hourly rate or a minimum spend for its own work. What the enquiry form asks for instead is the couple's own overall budget for the celebration, and the 2 Swiss versions of that same form disagree with each other. On the services page, the cheapest bracket reads "CHF 80'000 (intimate events only, up to 50 guests only)," alongside a stated per-guest floor of "CHF 2'000 per guest for the wedding day." On the about page, the identical field asks instead for "CHF 70'000-80'000 (intimate events only, up to 60 guests only)." 50 guests on one live page, 60 on another, for the cheapest bracket of the same service. Above that floor, both pages line up on the same run of brackets, up through "CHF 500'000" at the top.

The Italy and Portugal pages use a related but not identical field: theirs asks for a "TOTAL Event Budget" rather than a day-only one, priced in EUR, with a stated floor of roughly EUR 1'200 a head and a cheapest bracket of EUR 60'000-70'000 for up to 50 guests. None of these figures is what GAEA charges to plan a wedding. They describe what the couple should expect the celebration itself to cost, and the enquiry form appears to use that number to gauge whether a given wedding fits inside the 10 slots the business takes on in a year.

Where the work has actually happened

The portfolio names specific venues rather than gesturing at regions, and it spreads well beyond the Bern head office: Baur au Lac in Zurich, Château Gütsch above Lake Lucerne, Schloss Oberhofen, The Chedi in Andermatt, Hotel Guarda Val in Lenzerheide, Six Senses and Le Crans & Chetzeron in Crans-Montana, a wedding near St. Moritz, one at the Oeschinensee, and several returns to Gstaad, including Le Grand Bellevue and Wasserngrat alongside the Palace itself. Gstaad Palace gets a line of its own in the case studies rather than a slot in a gallery: "Gstaad Palace is among our closest venue partnerships. We work there regularly and coordinate directly with the hotel's event and housekeeping teams." That reads as a working relationship, not a one-off booking.

Italy runs through Tuscany, Umbria, the Italian Lakes (Lake Como, Lake Maggiore and Lake Garda are all named on the region page), the Dolomites and Puglia, backed by real weddings shown at La Posta Vecchia near Rome, in Perugia and in Verona. Portugal's copy points to the Douro Valley, naming Six Senses and Octant there, and the Algarve, with a named property, Tivoli Carvoeiro, plus a country-house wedding in Vora. That is a genuinely national footprint inside Switzerland rather than a single-city studio with a national-sounding name, and the same range carries into 2 more countries rather than stopping at the border.

The credentials, and the 10 slots they're chasing

The badges on the site are worth reading as claims rather than verified rankings: it states it is recommended by Switzerland Tourism, names itself among "Switzerland's Top 5 Wedding Planners" per WEZOREE for 2025, and says it was featured in Forbes France. None of the 3 is checked further here; they are what GAEA says about itself, in the same register as the client testimonial on the homepage calling it "the best Wedding and Event Planner in Switzerland."

What is checkable holds up. The annual cap is stated plainly rather than implied, the language claim shows up twice in nearly identical words on 2 separate pages, and 4 dated, guest-counted case studies back up both the geographic range and the finding that scope actually varies from wedding to wedding behind one advertised label. Where the pages fall short is exactly where a couple planning from abroad would look first: no published fee anywhere, a budget form that contradicts itself on where its own cheapest bracket ends, and, across the FAQ, the services page and all 4 case studies, not one mention of the civil preparatory procedure, apostilled documents or a registrar, in either direction, so a couple would need to raise that groundwork directly rather than read it off the site. None of that rules GAEA out. It means the discovery call the site keeps pointing toward is doing real work the pages themselves do not, and for a couple weighing one of the 10 annual slots against a specific date, the fee itself is one of the things that call still has to answer.