Slow to Take Off, After a First Date They Cruised

Ms. Feldman added that the couple has “grown very close to each other’s parents,” and that her mother and father, Susan Horowitz and Rick Feldman, have developed individual friendships with Mr. Esocoff’s parents “that exist independently from us.”

Coming from a family of architects and being one himself, Mr. Esocoff said he at first “had to come around to the idea of not marrying an architect.” But “when I thought about whether Sascha would be a good partner,” he added, “I figured, ‘Well, she deals with artists every day, so she must be able to put up with me.’ This proved to be correct in many ways.”

On Dec. 22, 2019, a few hours before the two were to board a flight to Rome, Mr. Esocoff asked Ms. Feldman to marry him at the TWA Hotel at John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens. He described his proposal — which he had plotted out a week earlier with the maître d’ at the hotel’s restaurant, Paris Café — as “an expression of love through design.”

“We decided on the perfect table,” he said, and that the maître d’ would deliver Ms. Feldman a wrapped box containing her engagement ring at the end of their meal “as if it was a present.”

But the box was actually a copy of “Designing TWA: Eero Saarinen’s Airport Terminal in New York,” a book about the history of the former TWA Flight Center, a designated city landmark, that became the hotel. “With a small X-acto knife, I hollowed out a square in the center” of the book “and inserted a piece of foam for the ring to sit in,” Mr. Esocoff said.

Using the TWA logo, he had also designed the paper it was wrapped in, as well as stationery on which he wrote a note “in the voice of” Mr. Saarinen, the building’s architect, “wishing us luck on our big adventure,” he added.