Today we’d like to introduce you to David Hahn.
Hi David, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I am originally from Los Angeles and have been an event and floral designer since 2003. By a sheer stroke of luck, my first gig was to design for the SAG Awards’ Celebrity Lounge, then shortly after, the Celebrity Lounge for American Idol, the Cannes Film Festival Reception at the Motion Picture Academy, and was chosen by Details Magazine as ‘Hollywood’s Hottest Florist’ within our first year. In 2010, I was approached by Audi to design exclusively for them and traveled coast-to-coast for the next five years designing their VIP media launches, parties, executive dinners, etc., as well as for Cadillac later on. Raising two children alone at the same time, became very exhausting, always under the pressure of executing large-scale designs in places we had never been to, whether on top of an Aspen mountain or 7 Mile Beach in Grand Cayman.
My team and I represented the face of Audi, as we were often reminded, and there was never any room for error. As my sons were graduating high school, I had the inspiration to use my unique experience staying and working in the world’s best resorts and venues to open my own, and some unknown force led me to the Texas Hill Country. I looked at hundreds of ranches and properties, flying back and forth from L.A. to Austin for over a year.
When I first saw King River Ranch, I knew it was perfect and bought it immediately. It was too good to be true in every way that proved itself over six years of 100% successful weddings and events. It’s simply a flawless venue. Logistically, it is ideal. Vendors can drive a mac truck directly to every area of the ranch, from ceremony to reception, which makes load-in/load-out as easy as can be. Clients and their guests can easily stroll from the river to ceremony to reception to fishing pond to lodging to horse pasture to parking within seconds, while each area is so separate and unique from the other. Also, being a river property, the land slopes gently, making pictures even more dramatic as opposed to land that is flat.
Speaking of pictures, our wedding couples can easily stroll to magnificent and diverse backdrops; the river, rocky river banks, horse-filled pastures, fishing pond… all easily reachable in a single cocktail hour. The best part for me, having two sons just starting to drive, is that there are no winding unmarked roads to reach the ranch. Over the years, I have only come to love this place more and more. At the risk of sounding like the weirdo from California, I believe there is a Sedona-like energy vortex there. It was inhabited by Native Americans for hundreds of years which are perhaps why. During my seven years at the ranch, we experienced jaw-dropping and inexplicable miracles there, as have our clients. It just has very good vibes!
I left Texas in 2019 for retirement, leaving the operation of the ranch to Amy, our beloved venue manager. Shortly after, Covid-19 struck the world, and life really has never been the same. I was in a strict 15-month lockdown with my family in Los Angeles and unable to return to Texas. Somehow, we overcame the challenges of the pandemic and are finally well on track back to normal. I still live in L.A. and if the pandemic weren’t enough, our family is directly involved in the war in Ukraine. My sons were actually adopted in 2001 from Kharkiv, Ukraine, the city that has been totally devastated by Russian bombs, and I am in daily contact with our Ukrainian family west of Kyiv. I was actually on the phone with Ukraine planning a family reunion there when the first bombs began to fall from the sky in February.
The first few months were simply terrifying and shocking. I just really don’t have the words to explain it. We cried rivers together. After the war shifted to the East, they were able to come up from the cellars and basements, and life returned somewhat back to normal. With my Ukrainian nephew, I started a nonprofit and humanitarian aid group supplying food and medicine to animal rescues in Zhytomyr Oblast in central Ukraine. You can check out our website at www.ruffukraine.org where you can actually read our Ukrainian story in more detail. If you are an animal lover, please share our Go Fund Me! https://gofund.me/7dc98e11.
This was my improbable journey from Hollywood to Hill Country to learn about all the different kinds of Russian bombs, a life that I could never have planned or foreseen. But in the end, my years at King River Ranch were the most magical moments of my life, as it has brought this magic to countless lives over the years and will continue to for many more to come!
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Finding the perfect property that could work as a venue was a challenge with so many pieces of the puzzle to consider; parking, logistics, client accommodation, fabulous ceremony backdrop, reception facilities for all types of weather, etc. I think that because King River Ranch was created as a venue to host large events as opposed to an already owned property that I turned into a venue, there are a lot of benefits in the details for our clients. But after I thankfully found KRR, the challenge became a building in the Hill Country that was exploding at the time between Fredericksburg and Austin.
We are in the heart of the 290 Wine Trail next to the LBJ Ranch where construction was happening everywhere you looked, especially at that time in 2015-2016. Finding a simple electrician took many months, so the building process took much longer than anticipated. Once we began to host weddings, the venue performed even better than I had hoped. I can’t think of any major issues or any client that wasn’t over the moon when they left. Venues were popping up everywhere at the time, but we were still able to increase our bookings by 30% per year despite a new venue opening every day. The real challenge was when the pandemic hit, of course.
We were forced to close for many months and to reschedule many weddings. Somehow, we made it through with every client happy in the end. It has taken a long time to get back to normal, but we are finally well on the way. It was a traumatizing experience on many levels for everyone. But I think the wedding/event industry felt the blow in a heavier way than most.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I was a real estate agent in Beverly Hills, CA when I adopted my two sons, Willem and Aidan, from an orphanage outside Kharkiv, Ukraine in 2001. About 8 months later, we all woke up to the shock of 9/11 that changed everything. Overnight, all real estate came to a halt, and it scared me with two new children that my income could be affected so suddenly. So, over the next couple of years, I looked for an alternative career that would provide my family stability should calamity strike again. My mom, my sister, and my mom’s best friend all had flower shops, so I grew up around them.
My dear friend is a wholesaler at the L.A. Flower Market, so we began simply by delivering humungous bouquets of fresh flowers direct from the market to the client’s door. It was quite successful, and after a year or so, by a fluke, another dear friend who was a producer at the SAG Awards asked me to design the flowers for the Celebrity Lounge in 2004 and then the 2005 shows at the Shrine Auditorium. It turned out that I had a knack for it as we got a lot of heavy-hitter gigs and substantial notoriety within our first year. Once the recession hit, we shifted to primary weddings and corporate events. I did all the events for Audi only when they were in Southern California, but after a couple of years, they asked me to not only design the florals for all their VIP events throughout North America but also design every aspect of the event decor from flowers to furniture to linens to lighting and down to the last butter knife. Our first traveling gig was at a haunted pre-Revolutionary War mansion on the Hudson River in Upstate New York, and it got more interesting from there.
We never knew if we would end up high above the Las Vegas Strip or at the Concours D’Elegance in Carmel. The first two years were incredibly hard. Every program included several events and dinners that went on for one to two weeks with often a six-figure budget to manage in a location that could be literally anywhere. I had to submit a comprehensive design for each program that had to be approved a dozen times up to the VP of Communications. Over time, I put together a dream team of designers that flew in from D.C. to Montana to San Diego, and we had to get the job done somehow. Every program was different and incredibly stressful. But over time, the Audi executives who hosted the events got to know me and my team so well, that they trusted us totally, and it became much more relaxed. We got it down to a science and would see each other once a month in another fabulous hotel 0r resort with hugs and kisses instead of anxiety over the exact color of the hydrangea. It actually became a lot of fun for all of us.
After five years of traveling with Audi and raising two boys on my own at the same time, traveling one week a month became more burdensome than exciting, so I started to think of an alternative. The client always provided rooms and workspace for us at whichever hotel or resort the program was at, so I had a unique background, staying and working at the best venues in the world, really getting to know the belly of the beast, and not just quick set-up and strikes which is the usual vendor experience at a venue, nor confined to a single city or region. Part of my job as a designer was to conduct site visits all over the country with the Audi team to potential venues for future programs, so I have given a lot more thought to what great venue needs than most, I suppose. That’s why, I think, I knew King River Ranch was perfect in every way as soon as I saw it.
I designed most of the weddings in the first three years when I returned to California just before the pandemic. I had hoped to continue floral and event design at the ranch, but designers are far and few between in the Hill Country. I am currently retired from events and running R.U.F.F. Animal Rescue Fund, a CA nonprofit and certified Ukrainian humanitarian aid group providing food and medicine in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. Rescuing Ukrainian Furry Friends!
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
Working in weddings and events in any capacity is particularly pressure-filled because wrongs cannot be made right later. Do-overs are not an option, so superhuman attention to detail is the baseline to be a successful vendor in this industry. When traveling with Audi, we had a saying, ‘we are only as good as our last event’, meaning each event is a do-or-die endeavor, regardless of how many successful events we had under our belts in the past. I also always worked for my clients with the guiding principle that once the design has been approved, we “make it right no matter what.” We never bring our problems to the client or costs that were not thought of before the contract was signed, after which it is not about money, it is about being reliable. It is up to us as professionals to have thought of everything. An oblivious client is a happy client! Of course, things will go off the rails from time to time, but the client should always feel confident that you are crushing it. Keep your cool at all times, even if you feel your aorta may explode. Weddings and events are definitely not for the weak-hearted.
As a vendor or venue owner, the environment you create is felt by everyone, including the client. I have noticed over the years that a lot of vendors, especially venues and planners, feel that if there is not a fire to put out or if they are not making it unnecessarily hard with hard and fast rules, they are not doing their job. My only rule is “let’s make it easier, not harder.” It’s just so simple! Being as flexible as possible is essential to a successful event because there are so many moving parts. As a venue owner specifically, the biggest quality most often missing that I saw working as a vendor for many years is that most people who open private venues never worked in the wedding and event industry. In most cases, they either had a piece of property to make work as a venue or thought it would be fun at the end of another career.
This often creates a tense situation between vendors and venue owners which is unnecessarily problematic. Until the venue owner sees themselves as one of the vendors, a part of the team, and not the overlord, that tension will only increase the risk of mistakes and an unhappy client. My suggestion for anyone opening a venue without previous event experience is to hire people who have many years in weddings and events. Again, this is not the kind of business that one has the luxury of learning as they go along.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.thekingriverranch.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/kingriverranch
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/kingriverranch
Image Credits
Amy Gawlik Photography and Christina Carroll Photography
