It was the last day of their sun-drenched holiday in Sardinia when the U.K. Premier League soccer player Dominic Calvert-Lewin proposed to his girlfriend, model and interior designer, Sandra Jerze. The plan had gone west half a dozen times—he’d hidden the ring (a dazzling emerald cut) in his sock, stuffed inside his suitcase, for the entire holiday. “I wanted it to be perfect, and things weren’t perfect,” he laughs. “Sandy organises everything, and I’m not a very good organizer. It’s typical that it took me until the last day to get it right!” But the Everton striker had one ace up his sleeve: with some behind-the-scenes orchestration from the hotel staff, Sandra’s favorite bottle of wine—a 2001 Sassicaia brought in all the way from Milan—was waiting on a private beach at sunset. “I didn’t suspect a thing,” Sandra says. “We’d been talking about rings, so I thought maybe it could be in the summer… I just didn’t know where or when.”

Their story began three years ago at London’s Chiltern Firehouse, where they met through mutual friends. “It just snowballed from there,” Dominic explains. At the time, Sandra was living in Switzerland and Dominic in Manchester, but their connection was magnetic from day one. “We kept meeting up in London,” he says “Then Sandy came up to Manchester for a couple of days…” “And I never left!” Sandy interrupts. Some six months later, the pair were smitten—Sandy had moved to the UK from Zurich, and they were having conversations about starting a family. “We had Ahava pretty quickly,” says Dom. Their baby daughter, born in the summer of 2023, arrived first, followed by the proposal nearly a year later.

When it came to planning the wedding, Sandra took the reins. “I’m one of those people who’d rather do something properly or not at all,” she says. She spotted her ceremony gown—the first dress she tried on—at Brown’s Bridal: a long-sleeved, ivory lace number with a trailing veil (finished with their initials, S&D, embroidered, of course) from designer Dana Harel. “I looked at the dress, and was like, ‘I’ll take this one,’” she recalls. “That’s the story. I tried on one dress and it was the perfect one!” For the civil courthouse proceedings the day prior, she had similar luck. “I knew I wanted a Chanel two-piece for the first day,” she explains. So what did she do? She Googled exactly that, and then bought the listing that came up: a sophisticated Karl Lagerfeld-era jacquard mid-length skirt and jacket, sourced from Farfetch. “It was the first one you saw, right?” Dominic chimes in. “I was like, ‘That’s perfect, I’m going to order this,’” Sandra concurs.