Pyrite Sun
About Pyrite Sun
Sarah Jane Mallin founded Pyrite Sun after working in the art & design world and wanting to refocus her creative energy on the things that matter most in life: food and love. Pyrite Sun began as a farming and cooking enterprise—growing flowers, herbs, and vegetables on an organic farm while catering to art gallery events and private dining for artists and gallerists. By creating a conversation between artwork and the food for artists such as David Hockney, Theaster Gates, and Patti Smith, we realized that every celebration deserved the same artistic care and immersive experience with food, flavor, beauty, sensory exploration and ideas.
A feast at a wedding symbolizes an offering of nourishment for your journey ahead as a couple. Sharing that meal with your family and friends acknowledges how important each guest will be in supporting your union. The meal should be celebratory, abundant, vibrant, flavorful, alive, and memorable for such an important occasion! Extraordinary, shared meals more connected with nature, ourselves, and each other. At Pyrite Sun, we believe that your wedding meal should be a memorable gift for your guests and a sensory celebration befitting the bright future that you are embarking upon as a couple.
Beyond crafting beautiful, delicious custom menus, Pyrite Sun designs all-inclusive experiences that include specialty cakes and desserts, floral design, vintage tablescape and furniture rentals, event styling, wedding planning, and vendor coordination. Our home base is the historic Colvin House on Lake Michigan in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, a beautiful wedding venue where we house our collection of beautiful things, and organically grow herbs, vegetables, berries, and flowers used in our offerings.
Staying Sustainable
For Pyrite Sun’s owner, Sarah Mallin, sustainability is more than a business practice; it is her mission in life to help people understand our interdependence with nature one meal at a time. From experience achieving organic farm certification during Pyrite Sun’s Physic Garden project, to her memories “digging for gold” of potatoes with her grandfather on his farm, sharing enthusiasm for the amazingness of nature is Sarah’s greatest passion. We are interdependent with all of nature; we are alive because we eat and breathe the food and oxygen that plants supply for us through an intricate and fragile web of connections. Pyrite Sun strives to nurture ecosystems far beyond employing sustainable practices.
Because we want you to taste the living energy in every bite of food, we grow our own herbs and vegetables throughout the summer months, and microgreens and herbs indoors during winter to provide the freshest flavors.
In addition to the fresh produce that we grow ourselves, we support organic, sustainable and local farmers and source only whole food products without chemicals or preservatives.
We work with local farms, butchers, and ocean-safe fish producers to procure the freshest and most responsibly produced meats, ingredients, and supplies.
Our cleaning supplies meet the highest green standards. We reduce the use of paper towels and eliminate disposable cleaning or serving products.
We start hard-to-find edible flowers, cut flowers, and floral greens from organic seeds and take specific floral requests for growing early in the season, filling our wedding arrangements with just picked local flowers that would be difficult to otherwise obtain without shipping and pesticides.
Our gardens support pollinators and wildlife to nurture a beneficial ecosystem, and are particularly focused on bee and butterfly habitats for reproduction.
Floral foam and chemicals or preservatives are never used in our floral arrangements, gardening practices.
Vintage vases, candles, tableware and serving pieces are used onsite at Colvin House (reducing the need for rentals being trucked in and out constantly) or are picked up at the end of the event when used off-site. Disposable items are never used.
We use only organic gardening supplies and the highest sustainable standards in cleaning supplies throughout our operations.
We focus our table scape items and rentals on repurposed vintage items and furniture, rather than buying new mass-produced products or single use items.
We work in a historic mansion, repurposed into an events venue, and have built everything needed for a wedding onsite.
We have a detailed recycling system in place and compost food scraps offsite, as well as passive composting in our gardens.
We partner with and promote other Green Wedding Alliance vendors to promote the most sustainable events possible from start to finish!
