London Wedding Flowers – Inspiration for Dressing Your Dry Hire Wedding Venue

London Wedding Flowers – Inspiration for Dressing Your Dry Hire Wedding Venue 

If you’re planning your wedding, your first consideration has most likely been the venue. Finding somewhere that can host all of your guests, facilitate all of your ideas as well as reflect your taste can be a challenge. One way of making your wedding day truly unique and true to you as a couple is to use a dry hire venue: a blank canvas that gives you the freedom to make a space your own. In this blog post I share with you my advice on how best to approach a dry hire venue and my experience working in them. I also share London wedding flowers image inspiration from one of my favourite weddings held last summer at Trinity Buoy Wharf.

To Dry Hire or not to Dry Hire

Be under no illusion that a dry hire venue will save you much money; and for the pennies one may save you, it may not be worth the stress likely caused. As much as they are desirable for their custom-ability, they require an inordinate amount of organisation and logistics, by comparison to a furnished venue.

When making that comparison between dry hire and those that aren’t, really consider the pros and cons and be fully aware that going dry hire just quite simply will be a lot more work. Wedding planning stress should not be underestimated – pick your battles and work out what is important to you both.

When a Wedding Planner is Key

When hiring a dry hire space my first and top suggestion is to employ a wedding planner. There will almost certainly be questions and costs that you won’t think to enquire about that will be integral to a smooth flow of your day and the avoidance of surprise bills later on in your planning.

Your venue will likely come with a dedicated venue manager, but this person won’t offer the same hands on support and best intentions for creating your dream day. They will have regular suppliers that they like to work with, however credible these may be, this won’t result in a bespoke outcome, the very reason you might have gone down the route of dry hire.

A good wedding planner will listen to your wishes and requirements and work closely with specially selected suppliers, doing all the back and forth, cross-comparisons and budgeting so that you don’t have to. Beyond the admin, they are invested in designing a unique celebration that is representative of you. They don’t want to run out what they have done before for the sake of convenience.

London Wedding Flowers and Decor – Choosing the Right Suppliers

Should a wedding planner not be a priority for you or within budget, then I have a handful of crucial recommendations:

• Carefully choose suppliers that you can trust and who’s work you love. With a dry hire space, your suppliers’ advice and input with be invaluable. Listen to their ideas on how they can maximise impact. This could mean sacrificing some ideas and small details you had in mind, but with a large dry hire space it’s important to maximise impact in fewer areas as opposed to scattering lots of ideas and spreading your budget too thinly.

• Budget more than you expect, especially for decor.

• Don’t be too hasty to choose the least expensive quote from comparative suppliers – it won’t necessarily mean you are getting the same for less.

Of course, as someone who works with and sells London wedding flowers, I am biased, but I guarantee, without all the paraphernalia that a furnished venue comes with, a dry hire venue requires a lot to make it feel atmospheric.

Still Life Flowers and Wedding Planner, Hilde. Case Study - London Wedding Flowers and Decor Inspiration

Anne of Hilde. is someone that I have had the pleasure to work with a number of times. She put me forward as an option to wedding couple, Maya and Stephen, who chose me for their wedding at Trinity Buoy Wharf last summer.

As an interior designer, Maya had a focus on having an aesthetically beautiful wedding day. She chose a dry hire venue so that she could make it her own, working with suppliers she could put her trust in to transform the space.

Maya and Stephen wanted to bring their Indian and Italian cultures together and so decided on hues of warm oranges, gold and yellows to transform the four vast white walls that make up Trinity Buoy Wharf into a warm atmospheric setting.

Anne provided me with a dreamy palette and source of inspiration from hers and Maya’s design choices. I love striking a balance between potentially conflicting elements: I knew I would need to create impact in such a space but wanted to ensure a sense of softness and romance that reflected this understated couple.

Ochre was chosen as the lead colour for the arrangements: combo roses and vanda orchids formed the base of the arrangements, softened by delicate white sweet peas and creamy beige peppercorns. In using our signature grouped and sculptured style we created a harmony between the luxury Art Deco influence and the soft earthy aesthetic created for the day.

Suppliers

Venue – The Chainstore at Trinity Buoy Wharf

Wedding Planner – HILDE.

Photographer – Jessica Williams

Catering – Sabel Food

Some of my favourite weddings have been held at dry hire venues. So much energy, thought and attention detail has gone into these and has certainly paid off. If you are considering a dry hire venue, I hope you have found my suggestions helpful.

Read more about Maya and Stephens beautiful riverside celebrations at Harpers Bazaar.

For more London wedding flowers inspiration, have a look at Aimee & Simon’s botanical inspired day at The Barbican or Chris & Skyla’s Guildhall wedding mixing fresh and dried blooms and grasses.

London Wedding Venues – Barbican Wedding Inspiration

London Wedding Venues – Barbican Wedding Inspiration

In these strange times of lock down I have become weather obsessed. The same is to be said of many brides, anticipating the weekend ahead. Weather uncertainty can be a huge stressor or let down for those that have pictured a marquee wedding in glorious sunshine. This conundrum brings me nicely to the second in my series of London Weddings in Autumn, another example of a beautiful day that wouldn’t have been changed by hail or storms. The weather was no issue for Aimee and Simon, who celebrated their Barbican Wedding in October.

Barbican Wedding Ideas

As a celebrity stylist, I knew Aimee would have an exacting eye for just how she wanted everything to look on her big day. We spoke at lengths about her ideas, what she loved about the venue, her bridal party outfit ideas and party favour ideas. I use these points as not only a source of inspiration, but I also allow them to inform my design choices with flowers. I previously worked as an events manager and stylist and I see my role as ‘wedding florist’ very much to tie everything together, bridging aesthetic continuity across the day. Aimee is a visual person, so it’s no surprise that she had an abundance of ideas. I worked with her to consolidate the final look and how we would execute this through the florals.

Both Aimee & Simon loved the brutalist architecture of the Barbican and the somewhat out-of-place tropical nature that makes it feel otherworldly. We chose to work sympathetically with the ‘interior’, with floral design ideas that were effortless yet striking.

How to style a Barbican Wedding

On first viewing of the Barbican Conservatory Terrace, the couple felt this space lacked the same magic that the rest of the Conservatory had. They wanted to continue the overgrown plants into this area on both the tables and across the high ceilings.

For the tables we worked solely with tropical leaves that offered different shapes and sizes, creating a very simple table design which was highly effective. We arranged stems and trailing vines at different heights and lengths, creating an undulating table-scape that contrasted the white tablecloths. For a pop of colour, bottles of peachy rhubarb gin, made by Aimee and Simon’s family, provided this accent along the tables.

Decorating the vast ceiling was a challenge but we decided to work with one variety en masse to create as much impact within budget, whilst looking as if it had grown there. Meters upon meters of Spanish moss was strung together to form long trails that were suspended above the guests heads.

Fashion and Flowers

With Aimee designing all the outfits herself, I was so excited to see what she had created. Simon and the groomsmen wore very timeless all black, which the bridesmaids and flower girls made a nod to in their accessories. For the bridesmaids’ hair, they wrapped slicked back ponytails with black velvet ribbon, used again for their simple wrist corsages that featured single orchid heads. Aimee’s dress was striking, clean and elegant which suited her so style well. She accessorised with gloves hand-strung with pearls and pearls again in her hair. Aimee wanted a feminine but ‘cool’ bouquet; to balance the detail she already had in her outfit, I used blousy garden roses and orchids in shades of white and the palest pink which made for a modern design that complimented her look. This has to be up there with my favourite bride’s looks.

Suppliers

The Conservatory itself makes for the most beautiful backdrop to wedding photography. Iona Wolff, who also works a lot in the celebrity world took these incredible shots, with second shooter, Chloe Winstanley.

Photography – Iona Wolff and Chloe Winstanley

Styling – Aimee Croysdill

Hair – Sami Knight

Make – Up - Lucy Wearing

Venue – The Barbican Conservatory

Testimonial

““Still Life Flowers made my vision come to life. They also let me explore new ideas throughout the planning process and helped guide me to make the right decisions without diluting the end result and impact. I’ll be forever grateful to them for making me feel secure in knowing that when I stepped in to my venue on the day of my wedding it was going to look the way I imagined it, and it really did. Absolutely faultless.”
- Aimee”

I hope this has inspired you to consider your own Barbican wedding come rain or shine. For more autumn wedding inspiration, take a look at Chris & Skyla’s London wedding at St Lawrence Jewry Church and Hawksmoor Guildhall.

London Wedding Flowers - Off-season Wedding ideas for postponed London Weddings

London Wedding Flowers - Off-season Wedding ideas for postponed London Weddings

This wet and windy weather has had me reminiscing about some of my favourite London wedding flowers we have had the pleasure of making...

If you’re wedding has been postponed this year, I’m in that same boat with you. I know how it can be less than straightforward trying to find a date that all of your suppliers can do, whilst being at a time of year that you had always imagined.

2021 is set to be a busy wedding year, with so many postponements on top of recently booked dates and new engagements. For these reasons, you may be faced with little option other than to postpone for a time of year that is traditionally not so busy.

I want to share with you some of my favourite Autumn London weddings across a number of blog posts to show you that the weather really doesn’t matter on your wedding day. Let’s face it, we’re in England…next June could be just as miserable…

First we have Chris and Skyla who were married last October at St Lawrence Jewry Church and celebrated their reception at award-winning British steakhouse and London wedding venue, Hawksmoor Guildhall.

London Wedding Flowers - Design

Chris and Skyla had a strong sense of how they wanted their day to look and feel. They had many ideas and were looking for expertise from us to reign them in to bring visual continuity throughout their day. The style-conscious couple wanted their flowers to be unique and memorable without being ephemeral.

This can be a fine art to achieve but we created this by making individual arrangements, each different to the next, some with bounds of character and shape, balanced by others that were softer and more feminine. Following on from this brief, we chose a colour palette that infused classic bridal whites and soft pinks with more interesting earthy tones. The mood lighting of Hawksmoor required a lighter colour-way to contrast with the wood-panelled walls and speakeasy aesthetic. These more brown tones, made the arrangements season appropriate without being typically autumnal, which was important to Skyla.

Adding to the ‘interest’ we used a mix of fresh and classic blooms with dried flowers and grasses. The bridal flowers leant towards the lighter side of the palette and Hawsmoor saw the introduction of some of the mid-tone shades. This is a way I like to transition from one part of the day to the next, whilst ensuring a link throughout the floral design.

Food and Flowers - Reception at Hawksmoor Guildhall

Hawksmoor as a London venue is beautiful but of course what they are known for is their food. I do always ask my couples about their menu as it is important that flowers and food do not compete – by this I mean physically collide where there is not enough room on the table for both. A considered tablescape to encompass both is easily achieved with some forward planning.

As to be expected at a Hawksmoor wedding, food was certainly at the centre of this occasion. We allowed for large sharing platters by tailoring arrangements to the size of table and number of guests at each. No one wants to battle a rose to get to the triple-cooked chips…

Suppliers

Skyla and Chris did an amazing job curating a list of suppliers that worked harmoniously together. I have had the pleasure of seeing Natalie of Sixfold Studio’s stationery a number of times as I’m placing the flowers in final position. Our brands work well together as I feel we both create work that is modern and yet timeless. Jessica Williams Photography was the ideal choice for this wedding and the time of year itself; she has a stunning way of capturing a gloomy day in such a graceful fashion…resulting in the type of photos you want on your walls and not just on your computer. Below are just some of them….

Photography - Jessica Williams

Make-Up - Carla Francesca

Hair - Nicole Deabreu Hair

Stationery - Sixfold Studio

Dress - Lola Varma stocked at The Fall Bride

Venues - Getting ready at The Ned, Ceremony at St Lawrence Jewry Church & Reception at Hawksmoor Guildhall

Silk Ribbons - Lancaster and Cornish

Cake - By the Groom himself!

We would be delighted to discuss plans for your Autumn London wedding flowers. For more ideas and costs, please visit our contact page to express your interest and we shall be in touch with our price guide. We look forward to working with you.