Alternative, Real Weddings

06.02.2012

 

I am so in love with this week’s very first feature :-) From the dreamy and beautiful photography to the amazing couple, Lisa and Phil.

Lisa and Phil were married at the Marylebone Town Hall followed by a quirky-cool reception at The Union Club in Soho. They wanted a laid back do, but that still packed tons of their personality into their day.

Lisa wore the most beautiful bespoke Joanne Fleming wedding dress with some gorgeous Louboutin heels. Groom Phil wasn’t left out, he looks very dapper in his bespoke Gresham Blake suit, and they both had matching bright blooms.

I think my favourite recpetion details have to be the touches of brown paper and cardboard… chic yet simple.

Thanks so much to the amazing Ellie Gillard Photography for sharing her images today, here is what she had to say about the day;

‘Lisa and Phil’s was my last wedding of the season, and what a wedding. From the moment they told me about their fantastic venue and their plans for the day I couldn’t wait. The day was so perfectly London, and the Union club, in a slightly crooked building in central Soho and with walls crammed with ephemera, was the perfect venue for a sophisticated, laidback literary wedding. 

The first time I met them, in a basement bar in London’s Covent Garden and we chatted about cats over a beer I knew they would be my ideal clients, they were great to shoot, up for anything and super laid back. Their engagement shoot took in the pub they met for their first date, a beautiful rose garden and even the outside of their office and it was great to be able to tie in things that were so important to them and their relationship into the photography.

Special mention has to go to Funmi from FOPhotography who was an excellent second shooter on the day.’

Names…. Lisa & Phil

Wedding Date…. 24th September 2011

The Proposal…. Phil proposed on a Saturday morning in April 2010. We had been out the night before so I was a little hungover but he insisted on making us trek to the top of Reigate Hill – a beauty spot with views stretching all across the south downs, near where we live – for a lunchtime picnic where he got down on one knee. It was a beautiful spring day and because of the volcanic ash cloud, the skies were silent and empty. Of course, I said yes straight away.

The Vision for the Day…. of paramount importance was that we wanted the day to be relaxed and informal with everyone having fun. Not used to being centre of attention, we approached it all very much with our guests in mind, thinking about what would be enjoyable for them. We decided quite early on that we didn’t want hundreds of people at the wedding, we wanted to be able to speak to everybody on the day (we ended up with 65 guests which was perfect). We also wanted a London wedding as we have friends and family all over the country and London has plenty to offer when it comes to travel and accommodation choices. London was also where we first met and lived together so it seemed the most natural choice.

The Planning Process…. the planning process was quite organic. We organised it all solely ourselves and bashed out ideas between us as and when they came to us. I must admit I spent a fortune on wedding magazines so that I could cut various quirky ideas out and stick them into a scrapbook. We booked the ceremony and reception venue about 6 months beforehand then left most of the rest of it until about 6 weeks before the day — our ethos of having a relaxed wedding day carried over into our planning too. We didn’t want to be living and breathing the wedding for months on end so by doing everything ourselves we could keep complete control and impose ‘no wedding talk’ weekends whenever we felt we needed them!

The Venue…. the venue for the ceremony was easy. We knew we wanted to be in Westminster as that was the borough in which we first met when we both worked together and it is the borough in which we still both work now. The Old Marylebone Town Hall is a very grand building with several ceremony rooms to choose from and as the marriage venue of various rock and roll alumni (Paul McCartney married there two weeks after us) it fitted the bill perfectly.

Our reception was held at The Union Club, a private members’ club in the heart of Soho. This venue was already known to us as we both work in book publishing and it is a regular industry haunt – often used for book launches and parties. It has a wonderful vibe with a relaxed bar area downstairs with leather chairs and various nooks and crannies and upstairs is a slightly more formal dining room. The walls are covered with art and artefacts which meant we didn’t have to think about decoration as it was all done for us. Crucially, we knew the food and service there is fantastic and using a venue like this meant we didn’t have to think about the extras like furniture hire, how much alcohol to order etc. It was all there for us and Gordon, the Union events planner pulled out all the stops for us.

The Dress and Accessories…. I struggled to have any vision for the dress I wanted to wear and felt pretty alarmed at the thought of having to spend endless weekends trudging round stuffy bridal shops. What I did know was that I didn’t want a full-on bridal gown, I still wanted to feel like me and for me to be wearing the dress rather than it wearing me. I made the decision quite early on that I would have a dress made for me and I toyed with the idea of ordering one online and having it shipped over from Chinabut I wasn’t brave enough. In the end, I came across Joanne Fleming design who is based in Brighton. She had some great reviews on various blogs and forums and her website showcases some amazing creations so I made an appointment to go and see her. As I spoke about my likes and dislikes to Jo, she started sketching on her pad and came up with a design that suited me perfectly – it was exactly what I was trying to envision from the start but hadn’t quite got there. All I knew is that I wanted short, floaty with a bit of lace thrown in! I was so, so happy with the final result. The materials, the detail and fit were all of the highest quality and hundreds of pounds cheaper than I would have found elsewhere. I couldn’t have asked for more.

I left the search for accessories even later. A week before the wedding, I still hadn’t decided! I ended up back in Brighton searching for underwear and came across She Said Boutique who sorted me out perfectly. I came away with a stunning ivory corset and a bra and knickers that worked brilliantly under the dress. My biggest splurge was on a pair of peeptoe Louboutin’s which I found in Brown’s Bride just a few days before the wedding!

Groom’s Attire… Not being a fan of traditional tails, Phil was keen to have a suit properly made for him so that he could wear it again after the wedding. He found contemporary ‘tailors to the stars’, Gresham Blake, while we were on one of our many trips to Brighton. He ended up with a perfectly made to measure slim fit navy suit with a purple/pink lining. He accessorised with a slim purple tie from Thomas Pink, purple socks and some gorgeous tan shoes from Russell and Bromley.

The Readings + Music… it took a while for us to find readings that were right for us. We were keen on having an extract from a book as books were our ‘theme’. We eventually found a beautiful extract about love from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Our other reading was a short poem entitled ‘24th September’ – it was written by a Turkish revolutionary, imprisoned in Moscow in 1945, for his future wife. Not only was the title perfect for our day but the few lines encapsulated everything we felt about getting married:

The best sea has yet to be crossed.

The best child has yet to grow up.

Our best days have yet to be lived;

and the best words I have wanted to say to you

are the words I have not yet said.

The music was also fairly easy to choose. Phil found an instrumental track called Lever Street by Death in Vegas which I walked down the aisle to – it is a very atmospheric song by a band that we both love and the organ made it sound very wedding-y. We played English Rose by The Jam while signing the register and then walked back down the aisle to an instrumental version of To the End by Blur who are my favourite band.

Beautiful Bridesmaids.… I had my sister, Jessica and three childhood friends, Eleanor, Charlotte and Clare as my bridesmaids. I rather meanly told them to sort themselves out when it came to dresses. My only criteria is that I wanted them to each wear something different and colourful, I wasn’t into the whole ‘matchy matchy’ look. Without even really consulting each other they ended up wearing green, yellow, orange and blue dresses respectively and they could not have looked better. They complemented my bright flowers and I gave them each a wrist corsage so set them apart from the other guests as bridesmaids. They looked wonderful.

The Flowers…. we left it quite late to choose flowers and ended up going to our local florist – Greensleeves — across the road from where we live. I wanted a bright bouquet with as many tropical colours as possible and the buttonholes and wrist corsages were to be made up from the various flowers included in my bouquet. The florist did an amazing job — by far the biggest triumph was the groom’s buttonhole made up of a hot pink grandiosa and purple cala lily that matched the lining of his suit to perfection.

The Cake…. Phil’s brother Andrew is a keen baker and makes incredible cupcakes so he suggested early on that making our cake would be his wedding gift to us. He did an amazing job creating a stack of red velvet cupcakes with delicious ivory cream cheese icing topped with a beautiful sugar rose. He also made a separate red velvet cake for us to cut and we topped this with a cake topper of two china cats dressed as bride and groom called ‘Mr and Mrs Miaowface’ to represent how much we love our cats!

Your Photographer.… we discovered Ellie on gumtree when she was advertising for couples to photograph to boost her wedding portfolio. We were looking for someone a bit more creative than your standard wedding photographer and Ellie fit the bill perfectly. She was so easy to work with and had some great ideas for shots. We couldn’t be happier with the final results, we want to frame each and every picture she took. Ellie also had Funmi as a second shooter on the day who amongst many others got some great pics of the groom and his best man/ushers while they waiting to go to the ceremony. Both of them worked their socks off the whole day and we can’t thank them enough.

The Details + Décor…. there was no need for us to worry about décor at either venue but we really went to town on some of the details! To ferry guests from the ceremony to the reception we hired a routemaster bus from Gwyn’s Great Red Bus Company. They arrived to collect us at the perfect moment just as we had descended the steps in a cloud of confetti. For the bus journey, we had brought with us several cool bags of chilled mini bottles of sparkling wine for everyone. We had got some personalised labels from notonthehighstreet.com to jazz them up and gave everyone a colourful straw to drink with. We also sourced some ‘boxerchips’ from Ireland which are small boxes of crisps that fold out into a handy cardboard pot – much easier than fiddling about with packets.

For the reception we gave everybody a goody bag filled with personalised pencils, table quiz questions and a celebrity face mask so we could be greeted by the stars as we arrived at dinner! Some of the best pictures are of our guests in their masks – we did our best to give everyone a mask that represented them so there was much hilarity when they opened their bags to find out who their celebrity alter ego was. The main part of out favour was a book for everyone. We both chose our 4 favourite books and matched one of them to each guest – fortunately we got staff discounts on most of the books!

For the music at the reception we decided to hire a jukebox and left it up to our guests to choose which music they wanted to hear. The rule of the jukebox was that if your song came on, you got on the dancefloor! This worked really well although there were quite a few interesting choices. At one point we segued from The Kinks into The Prodigy!

The Honeymoon…. the criteria for our honeymoon was paradise beach and sunshine with a little bit if culture thrown in. We settled on the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar in Tanzania because it fitted all the criteria and neither of us had been to Africa before. We stayed in a little resort called Pongwe in a gorgeous beach hut on a perfect white-sand beach dotted with coconut trees and looking out over turquoise ocean. It couldn’t have been more beautiful. The accommodation, although quite rustic, was full of gorgeous little touches like exotic flowers on our bedspread when we returned from dinner every evening and tea left on the veranda every morning for us to drink while watching the sun rise over the ocean. We sailed in traditional wooden boats alongside a pod of dolphins, were taught boardgames and Swahili by the locals and ate delicious food laced with incredible spices. Zanzibar is also known as the ‘Spice Island’ due to its abundant cultivation of various spices – every time the wind blew, you got a whiff of exotic smells. We spent the last few nights readjusting to civilisation in the capital, Stonetown, which was a heady mix of traditional Islamic culture, old English colonialism and Freddie Mercury who was born there… Zanzibar was everything we wanted for our honeymoon and more.

Memorable Moments.… The most memorable moment was when our routemaster bus arrived to transport us to the reception. It was beautifully decorated with balloons and ribbons but it still had its old route number displayed on the side – the number 47. It turns out that this nondescript bus route that covers the outer reaches of South London was the route my grandmother worked on as a conductor after the war. She was absolutely tickled pink and still thinks that to this day we had pre-arranged it. Infact we had no idea whatsoever, it was pure coincidence!

Advice for Other Couples.… The best piece of advice I received before getting married is don’t put pressure on yourself for this to be the best day of your life. It was certainly one of the best days of my life but that was because I enjoyed myself so much and didn’t get hung up on the small stuff. There were plenty of little details I had forgotten but when it came down to it, they didn’t matter at all. Perfection is just too hard to achieve so I resolved not get stressed about the little things. Infact, I have never felt so stress-free as I did on the actual day although I may have slightly overdosed on bach rescue remedy..!

Credit where credit’s due.…

Photographer Ellie Gillard 

Ceremony Venue Westminster Registry Office 

Reception Venue The Union Club 

Wedding Dress Joanne Fleming Design

Bridal Accessories She Said Boutique

Groom’s Suit Gresham Blake 

Bride’s Hair & Make-Up Sergio Giannasso 

Transport Gwyn’s Big Red Bus 

Flowers Greensleeves 

Champagne Bottle Labels notonthehighstreet.com

Snacks Boxerchips

Facemasks

Jukebox Hire SM Jukeboxes 

Wedding Night Hotel Hazlitt’s 

Honeymoon Africa Travel Resource 

 

Thanks so much to Lisa and Phil for sharing their awesome wedding with us today, please do leave them some love in the comments box below :-) xoxo Lou

 

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Tags: Multicolour, Real Weddings

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