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Vows

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Aside from occupations like submarine crewman, Everest Sherpa or space-station astronaut, few professions would seem to lend themselves less to the daily duties of marriage than nightclub owner.

Consider Noah Tepperberg, who with his professional partner Jason Strauss owns some of the highest grossing nightclubs and restaurants in the country, including the celebrity-packed Marquee, Lavo and Tao, which have locations in New York and Las Vegas.

A typical day for Mr. Tepperberg, 41, who oversees the New York properties, involves rising around 9:30 a.m., leaving his West Village apartment for the office around noon and working until 2 or 3 a.m., with nightly visits to each of his venues virtually mandatory.

“I work 15 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he said. “I’m always on. My business never sleeps.”

You may think that it would take a world-class party girl to keep up with a lifestyle like that.

Funny, then, that when love arrived, it came in the form of a wholesome-looking health and wellness coach, plant-based nutritionist and, yes, model: Melissa Wood.

“I meditate every morning,” said Ms. Wood, 33. “I do yoga, I do Pilates. I’m very grounded in my self-care routine.”

Mr. Tepperberg said: “She’s Mrs. Health and Wellness. I sell booze and steak and pasta.”

At least Ms. Wood knew what she was getting into. The two met in 2005, when Ms. Wood, then a 23-year-old model from Syracuse, took a job as a cocktail waitress at Marquee in Manhattan. During the two years she worked for him, the relationship was amicable, but had clear professional boundaries.

“He had such a strong, bold presence, but it was really understated,” Ms. Wood said. “He was always so businesslike. I just knew him as my boss. I had a boyfriend, he had a girlfriend, so we never really hung out.”

Mr. Tepperberg, for his part, recalled that Ms. Wood “was always one of the best girls, always on time, really one of our most responsible, professional people. But I never thought, ‘She’s going to be my wife.’”

In 2006, Ms. Wood left the club when she got a contract with the Ford modeling agency. For the next few years, they would see each other socially in group outings, but there was no hint of romance.

“The Melissa I thought I knew brought apples to work when everyone else was eating pizza, and went home early so she could be up early for yoga when everyone else went dancing until late,” Mr. Tepperberg said. “I always thought she wanted nothing to do with me because of what I did professionally.”

Eventually, however, each started to see the other in a different light.

“You know when you think you know someone, but you don’t?” Ms. Wood said. “I just saw Noah as such an ambitious go-getter, a doer, making the impossible happen.”

But, she added, “I really started to see that he was so kind, has the biggest heart, and is so loyal to his family, to his friends.”

Both of them, they discovered, came from big families with whom they remained extremely close. “I have four brothers and sisters, three of them live within 20 blocks of me, my mother lives three blocks away, we all see each other constantly, multiple times a week sometimes,” said Mr. Tepperberg, who grew up in the West Village. “It’s really the thing I love to do, and she loves that.”

The first stirrings of romance began on a 2010 trip to Ibiza, Spain, with about 25 friends. On that trip, they started to talk. And talk. The chemistry was obvious to all.

“Noah and I have been business partners for over 24 years, more than half our lives,” said Mr. Strauss, who was on the trip. “Needless to say, we are like brothers. I knew she was the one as soon as he asked, ‘What do you think about Melissa?’”

A couple of weeks later in New York, Mr. Tepperberg invited Ms. Wood to the Hamptons with a mutual friend. The friend canceled at the last minute, but Ms. Wood insisted she still wanted to go.

“I found myself that weekend saying, ‘Do I like him?’” Ms. Wood said. “‘No, I can’t like him. He’s Noah. We all know Noah.’ But it just happened. I just saw him for who he really was.”

Their first formal “date” came a short time later. He asked her to a movie, the Ben Affleck crime drama “The Town.” Leery of running into one of their many friends in Manhattan, he squired her away to Brooklyn, where they could go incognito. “It would have been big gossip,” he said.

Before long, they were inseparable.

Even before they got engaged, both knew that marriage was inevitable when they traveled together to a friend’s wedding in Mexico in 2013.

The friend had a 2-year-old daughter, and as Mr. Tepperberg watched the girl whirling around the dance floor, he remarked to Ms. Wood how it would be his dream to have his own child, with her, at a wedding of their own. She enthusiastically agreed.

Not long after, Ms. Wood, who was by then with the Next modeling agency, moved into Mr. Tepperberg’s three-bedroom co-op. As with any couple, there were some aesthetic differences to hammer out, Ms. Wood said.

“Noah has modern tastes, where I’m modern to shabby chic,” she said, “but we’re managing to really compromise — that’s the key word.” Just recently, Ms. Wood finally persuaded him to move his beloved red Gerard van den Berg chair, which she said “looked like a pair of lips,” out of the living room and into his office.

Her wellness mantra, too, began to shake him out of old habits. Before long, he was rising to do yoga with her in the morning, and surrendering his taste for meat and dairy as his fiancée took the lead in the kitchen.

“I’ll make brown rice pasta and add nutritional yeast instead of cheese, although he’ll try to sneak in cheese after,” she said. “I’ll chop up kale and mushrooms and zucchini, so that the pasta has a balance, and he loves it actually. It’s kind of what you do with a baby.”

She would know, having given birth to their son, Benjamin, on July 24, 2015. Benjamin’s arrival, which had been planned, they said, certainly changed the way the couple looked at their wedding.

“Once we were engaged and had the kid, the wedding was a formality,” he said. “I would call her my ‘wife’ after that. People would see her ring and call me her ‘husband.’”

The wedding was just, “When are we going to do the party?” But you can be sure that it was one heck of a party.

On Oct. 9, about 375 guests assembled at the Plaza hotel in Manhattan and transformed a wedding celebration into, essentially, a Wednesday night at Marquee. The event, predictably, drew a who’s who of New York night life: the club impresarios Paul Sevigny and Richie Akiva, the high-wattage D.J.s Jus-Ske, DJ Vice and Rony Seikaly (yes, that Rony Seikaly, the former N.B.A. center), along with many others.

The presence of Paris Hilton, along with her sister, Nicky Hilton Rothschild, made the entire room feel like a V.I.P. lounge, an impression nudged along by the sight of actors like Adrien Brody, Jackie Cruz (“Orange Is the New Black”) and Pauly Shore, who has been clubbing with Mr. Tepperberg since the early ’90s (“I was their first celebrity,” he recalled proudly).

Given the groom’s perch at the pinnacle of the club world, it was hardly surprising to see every detail planned to achieve maximum sensory impact. Before the ceremony, guests drank Dom Pérignon beneath the soaring stained-glass dome of the Plaza’s Palm Court before filing into the soaring Grand Ballroom, once home to Truman Capote’s famed Black and White Ball.

The wedding canopy looked like a volcanic eruption of white flowers, blanketed by roses, hydrangeas and Phalaenopsis orchids. Ms. Wood’s custom Lorraine Schwartz diamond, a cushion-cut yellow stone, twinkled with a brilliance that seemed blinding from the 30th row.

The obsessive attention to detail carried over to a lavish after-party at Lavo, on East 58th Street, where guests huddled in tufted leather banquettes, each stocked with what looked like a still life of excess: Belvedere magnums and Don Julio 1942 tequila bottles, each custom-engraved with “Melissa and Noah,” along with a cluster of chilled shot glasses and limes, all illuminated by spotlight.

The entire evening had just one hitch: Just before the ceremonial breaking of the glass, the shriek of a small child tore through the hushed room like a thunderclap. Guests winced, and craned their necks to locate the offending child (or more likely parent).

A sense of calm was restored when it turned out to be Benjamin, the couple’s 14-month-old son, who was dressed in a custom Seize sur Vingt tuxedo and black suede Pumas, and starting to fidget in the arms of an aunt.

“It was as if he knew something special was going on and he wanted to be part of it,” Mr. Tepperberg said. “So I whispered, ‘Let him up.’” As Ms. Wood held Benjamin in her arms, her diamond glittering, Rabbi Eva Sax Bolder pronounced them husband and wife.

“For once,” Mr. Tepperberg said later, “this was the baby everyone wanted to hear from during the ceremony.”