Ambeince Venue Styling work with hundreds of brides across the UK each year decorating venues with themes ranging from mad hatter’s tea parties to Great Gatsby-inspired celebrations! Here they reveal their top tips to decorating your venue, we hope some of their ideas will inspire you to dress your own venue.
The theme of your wedding starts with you – your dress, your tastes, your colour preferences and of course your budget! We encourage our brides to focus on co-ordinating from day one when the Save the Date cards go out to give your guests a flavour of the theme you have chosen for the day.
The way you do your decorations will be influenced by where you’re having your reception, here are our top tips to elegantly dressing your big day venue…
Hotel
Our top tip with hotels is to work with the décor of the room and think about how your colour scheme and theme will co-ordinator with the curtains, carpet colours and wall colour. Clashing colours don’t look great and we find that brides often don’t take this into account.
If you are not happy with the room décor, consider room draping. This is very romantic and not as costly as you might think. You may even be able to save money by choosing a lower-cost venue, which you can style as a blank canvass.
Barn
The best theme here is rustic, you can achieve some amazing looks with the rustic styling items now available. This year’s hot trend is hessian which would be perfect in a barn. Flower wise, large white gerberas in your centrepieces and on your top table will look great.
Country house
Less is more with this type of venue because the venue itself will be the star of the show. Decorations should be tasteful and subtle so that they enhance the venue. Often the chairs may not need covering but you can still decorate them with lace and cute chairbacks.
Church
The main thing we try to achieve when dressing a church is to soften and freshen the look of the church. Bay trees at the entrance decorated with the same coloured sashes as your chairs will look welcoming to your guests and can be moved to the entrance of the reception. Flowers on pew ends look great and with a bit of clever planning can be used as the flowers in your centrepieces as well!
Outdoors
If you choose to hold your reception outdoors (weather permitting!) you can be as creative as you like. You could opt for a rustic theme as mentioned above, with high tea on the lawn with hay bales and picnic blankets for seating. Hang tealights and birdcages from the trees and set up traditional games such a croquet and rounders. Lantern wedding decorations are also ideal for decorating an outdoor space and will provide light as the evening draws in. For a hot summers day or weddings abroad you could opt for bright colours, too. Whatever you do it needs to be fun!
