Alysa Treen-Regier remembers well the first time she shared a drink with Klaus Nienkämper. They had been invited to dinner by her sister and a mutual friend, Ms. Treen-Regier recalls, and "Klaus spilled a cocktail all over the evening gown I was wearing," she says. "He kind of stuck in my mind."
The University of Toronto summer student from Calgary and the president of Nienkämper Furniture and Accessories Inc. continued to cross paths through the summer of 2002. But Ms. Treen-Regier's birthday gave her sister an occasion to make a match. "Klaus kind of got conned into taking me out for my birthday . . . and after that we have been inseparable," she says.
Mr. Nienkämper, now 35, had been jaded about the dating scene. "Alysa was a prairie girl, a breath of fresh air," he says.
Yet romance collided with a harsh reality: She would be leaving to study abroad at the University of Economics, Prague, in September. So, in an impromptu decision, the duo dashed off to see her parents in Swift Current, Sask. "I broke it to them that I would not be returning to the University of Calgary after Prague, but moving to Toronto to be near this boy I had dated for only four weeks whom I knew was something special," says Ms. Treen-Regier, now 26.
During the next few months, they generated astronomical phone bills, Ms. Treen-Regier made a weekend jaunt to Toronto that stretched to two weeks, and in November, they toasted his birthday in Vienna. But, by Christmas, she had abandoned studies in Prague. Subsequently, she earned a joint degree in kinesiology from the University of Toronto and the University of Calgary with a specialty in international business and shifted her focus from finance to furniture, joining Mr. Nienkämper in Toronto as his media relations and marketing assistant.
On Christmas Day, 2004, after opening gifts with her family in Swift Current, Mr. Nienkämper nervously added, "I have one last gift," and plucked a diamond from under the sofa.
A more princely gesture was when he took her on a fairy-tale New Year's at a friend's palatial Paris residence near the Louvre. But he left the apartment key in a cab. "Alysa spent the night in this little roach motel and I spent half the night trying to get back in the apartment," he recalls with a laugh.
On a side trip from the Milan Furniture Fair, the pair were charmed by the seaside town of Positano, and persuaded the local priest to perform their nuptials in May, 2005.
But the fact they weren't Italian, Catholic or Italian-speaking became a serious problem. When they arrived to finalize the details, they found the priest had died, and his contrarian replacement quashed their plans.
The disappointment led to sleepless nights for Ms. Treen-Regier, she says. "I awoke Thanksgiving Monday and told Klaus I wanted to [marry]as soon as possible; we decided to go for Remembrance Day, only four weeks away."
Post-haste, she organized an intimate family wedding at the University of Toronto's Knox College Chapel on Nov. 11, officiated by Rev. Derek Parry. The epicurean excellence of the Canoe reception was complemented by the bridegroom's favourite, a 20-pound carrot cake carted from Saskatchewan by the bride's mother, Geraldine Treen. Celebrations continued the next day with a brunch backed by sonorous jazz at his parents' Creemore-area farm, and on New Year's Eve in Swift Current for the Saskatchewan contingent.
The couple supports Rethink Breast Cancer, and Ms. Treen-
Regier has been named to the Catherine Society, a new fundraising group inspired by Catherine the Great mandated to support education programs at the AGO.
She says: "This gal from the Prairies has developed a love for the urban lifestyle of interior design, pinot noir and charity events, and the boy from Forest Hill sits quite comfortably on the back of a quad motorcycle chasing cows in Saskatchewan with his new father-in-law."
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