ANNA BURNS-FRANCIS' DOUBLE WEDDING - 'WE'RE SO LUCKY TO HAVE EACH OTHER!'

The Breakfast host loved her two beautiful ceremonies - even if it meant having to do twice the work!

- Sophie Neville

When Breakfast presenter Anna Burns-Francis was in the thick of wedding planning, there were moments when she wondered if she’d made the wrong call by choosing to have not one, but two celebrations.

Being wed in an intimate church ceremony with close family, followed by a big party a week later, had seemed like the easier option when she and her beau Simon Gordon got engaged in New York a year ago. Yet in the lead-up, it dawned on Anna that she had perhaps doubled her bride-to-be's workload.

“I hadn’t quite calculated it would mean two florists, two photographers, two venues and twice the number of emails to arrange everything!” she laughs just days after saying “I do” to her now-husband Simon.

But on Saturday 29 July, when she and her partner of three years exchanged their deeply personal vows at St Joseph’s church in Wellington’s Mt Victoria, with just a handful of their nearest and dearest watching on, Anna, 37, knew they’d made the right call. Being married in such a peaceful and intimate way was just how the couple had imagined it.

“It felt incredibly meaningful and very much that this marriage is for us,” says Anna, who joined TVNZ’s flagship morning show at the start of 2023 after several years in New York as a US correspondent for 1 News. “We were able to tell each other the really important things with no distractions. It just felt very comfortable and very right.”