There were a few questions that came to mind when Rafe Totengco, the beloved accessories designer, told me he had tied the knot: Who was the lucky guy? How did you meet? What did you wear, and where will you honeymoon?
“The lucky guy is Mike Lawn, a Brit living and working in New York,” Totengco said. “He’s the Energy Market Specialist at Bloomberg.”
The pair meet “the old-fashioned way,” at least in the world according to Rafe. The year was 2009, and the location was East Village dive bar The Boiler Room.
“I, very much not a bar person, had been dragged there by friends determined to get me back on the scene after my recent break-up,” Rafe recalled. “Mike, very much a bar person, was there for a drink with an old friend. Our eyes met in the not so romantic queue for the bathroom – and later that night numbers were exchanged.”
The rest, of course, is history. Fast forward a decade, when the two escaped to their North Fork house with his months to weather the Covid-19 lockdown.
“These past five months of lockdown was the most time we’ve have spent with each other and it brought a real deepening of our love and appreciation for each other,” Rafe said. “I learned to take real joy in the growing garden with Mike and it’s now a passion we share. It was during this time that we discussed marriage. We had been together for over 10 years and both felt that it was time to make our relationship official.”
Mike was building a seating area in the garden that provided a new perspective of the lake they live on. “Once it was completed, sometime in May, we sat there and said ‘yes’ to each other,” Rafe recalled.
