By: Elowen Gray
The Austin founder works in balloons, blooms and carefully handled details. Her real specialty is the idea you haven’t seen yet.
There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a room just before the guests arrive. The marquee letters glow. A balloon garland arcs overhead. The florals are in place, the signage is squared, and the photo booth is ready. In Austin, the person taking one last look around that quiet room is more and more often Cristina Okoniewski.
As the founder of Bella Vida Moments, an event planning, décor and rental company, Okoniewski has built her reputation on transformation. Ask her what she actually sells, though, and she doesn’t start with a list. “Tell me what you’re imagining,” she says, “and let’s explore how we can make it happen.”
In its way, that’s a radical offer. In an industry that often hands clients a menu, Okoniewski hands them a blank page. Bella Vida Moments isn’t tied to a signature style, a single theme or a fixed catalogue of services. She wants every idea brought to her, especially ones nobody has seen her make before: an intimate dinner for twelve, a ballroom remade from floor to ceiling, a brand activation built to stop people mid-scroll.
She didn’t take the usual road into party planning. Okoniewski earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Texas A&M, where her graduate work focused on developmental and organizational psychology. She then spent years in sales and consulting. There she learned how people make decisions and how teams work together, and she learned to listen for what a client means as well as what they say.
You can see that training everywhere in her work. A psychologist knows a milestone birthday is never only about a number, and that a baby shower marks a new stage of life. An organizational thinker knows a flawless event is really a hundred small systems running together. Bella Vida Moments is where her creativity, her organizational instincts and her real delight in people all share a room.
Recently, she made it official and stepped into the business full time. She calls it “an especially meaningful chapter” in her journey as an entrepreneur, the moment a passion became her life’s work.
Every Bella Vida Moments event shares one thing: the design is personal. A birthday should look like the person blowing out the candles. A wedding celebration should feel like the couple’s private language, made visible. A corporate event should speak clearly in the brand’s own voice.
She has plenty to work with: planning and coordination, custom balloon installations, backdrops, florals, signage, marquee letters, photo booths and a growing rental inventory. Clients can book a single statement installation. Or they can hand over everything, from planning and styling to rentals, setup and teardown, and simply show up as guests at their own party.
The inventory has limits, but her imagination doesn’t. Okoniewski sources specialty pieces, creates custom designs from scratch, and coordinates with other vendors so every element comes together.
On the corporate side, Bella Vida Moments has become a quiet secret weapon for businesses that know an event is the most hands-on way to tell a brand’s story. Branded installations, product launches, client appreciation evenings and team celebrations get the same personal care as a family milestone. Here that care takes the form of logos, color palettes and the exact mood a company wants its guests to take home.
The most generous thing about Okoniewski may be what she doesn’t ask for. Clients don’t need to arrive with a mood board, a color story or a finished plan. Half-formed ideas are welcome, and shaping them is the part she loves most. Her goal is simple: hosts should get to enjoy the occasion, knowing every detail is being handled with care.
That silence before the guests arrive belongs to her. The joy that follows belongs entirely to you.
See her work and start planning your own event at bellavidamoments.com, and follow along on Instagram at @bellavidamomentsatx.
