The gallery
Canopies, jhoolas, torans, trays and platforms photographed close. Filter by ceremony and open any frame full size.
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Selected work
Projects, end to end.
Mandaps, jhoolas, haldi platforms and sangeet stages, built across New York, New Jersey and New England. Filter by ceremony below — or read one wedding in full first.
Featured project
S & S
The Palace, Somerset NJ · 2025. A floral mandap, a mirrored aisle and a reception stage that carried the same palette through the night.
The build
One palette, carried
One palette, carried
from muhurtham to midnight.
A ballroom wedding is really two designs sharing a room. The muhurtham needs a mandap the priest can work inside and both families can see into. The reception needs a stage that reads from the back of the room after the lights come down. Build them separately and the photographs look like two different weekends.
So the ivory, gold and deep rose were fixed first and everything else answered to them — the aisle, the mandap canopy, the reception backdrop, the table linen. Mirror ran down the aisle rather than up the walls, which keeps the light low and stops the ceiling fighting the canopy.
Hotel ballrooms give you a load-in window and a strike deadline, and both are shorter than anyone expects. The mandap was built to break down into pieces two people can carry, and the whole set was off the floor the same night.
Mandap build
Mirrored aisle
Reception stage
Ceiling drape
Entrance styling
- Venue
- The Palace, Somerset NJ
- Year
- 2025
- Ceremonies
- Muhurtham & Reception
- Palette
- Ivory, gold & deep rose
- Scope
- Full design & build
- Strike
- Same night, included
Somerset is a three-and-a-half hour drive from the studio. Travel outside the
Capital Region is normal here, and it is quoted as a line, not buried.
Ask about your venue
The work
Nine builds,
Nine builds,
by ceremony.
Every one of these started as a floor plan drawn against the venue’s real dimensions. Pick a ceremony to narrow the set.
Showing all 9 projects
Nothing filed under that ceremony yet. Try another — or ask, because it has almost certainly been built.
Every frame on this page is a design study drawn in the studio. Photography from the
real events lives on Instagram, where the families involved have said yes to it.
The record
How a project ends
How a project ends
up on this page.
Decor is temporary by definition. A mandap that took nine hours to build exists for four hours and is in a van by midnight. So the documentation is deliberate, and it happens on a schedule, not whenever somebody remembers.
It is also how a second wedding gets quoted honestly. If we know exactly how long a canopy took to rig at one venue, we are not guessing at the next one.
Nothing is published without the couple’s permission — not a photograph, not a venue name, not a date.
-
01
Weeks before
The study
Elevations and floor plans drawn against the venue’s measured dimensions — canopy height, aisle width, where the fire sits, what a guest sees from the fourth row. This is the drawing you sign off, and it is the first thing filed.
-
02
Load-in day
The build log
Frames at roughly forty and eighty per cent complete, plus the ugly ones: cable runs, rigging points, the pile of stems. Nobody publishes these. They are what makes the next quote accurate.
-
03
One hour before guests
The empty room
The set photographed clean, before a single chair moves. It is the only moment the design exists exactly as it was drawn, and it is usually the frame that ends up here.
-
04
During the function
Your photographer, not ours
We stay out of the aisle. The talambralu, the jeelakarra bellam, your grandmother crying — that belongs to your photographer, and the good frames get requested afterwards rather than taken on the day.
-
05
After the strike
The venue, empty again
The room photographed once more, bare, as evidence it went back exactly as we found it. Venues remember which decorators do this. It is why the good ones let us back in.
Pelli
Pellikuthuru
Pasupu
Mehendi
Sangeet
Nischitartham
Seemantham
Reception
The studio in numbers
2022
Designing since
6.4K
Following along
8
Ceremony specialities
100%
Custom-built, never templated
Registered in New York State in 2022 as Jyothsna Katari Wedding Design & Decor LLC (DOS ID 6480940), working out of Clifton Park.
Keep looking
Three other ways
Three other ways
into the work
Whole projects live here. The close-up details, the ceremony-by-ceremony scope and the reasoning behind it all live elsewhere.
What is included
Eight ceremony specialities, each with the line items that go into it — from kalasham staging to the load-in schedule.
See the services
How it is built
Six steps from the first conversation to strike, including when you see the floor plan and when you see the price.
Read the process
Now booking 2027 & 2028
Yours could be
Yours could be
the tenth.
Send the dates, the venue if you have one, and which ceremonies you are planning. You will hear back within one working day.