Luxury Stately Home Weddings

There’s no denying that when it comes to looking for your ideal luxury wedding venue, it’s hard to dismiss the grandeur and style that our country has to offer in some of it’s oldest houses. Whereas these bastions of aristocracy and gentrification were once only available to the elite, the increasing popularity of stately home weddings have allowed more and more gems to open their doors for nuptials.

Many of these estates are managed by the national guardians of heritage such as the National Trust and English Heritage, both of which have dedicated events teams in place to ensure that weddings at their finest properties are everything you could dream of.

Even more private houses are welcoming public weddings for the first time in the 21st century, so there’s never been a better time to indulge your bourgeois fancy!

As luxury wedding planners, we very much love the idea of hiring somewhere as elegant

Blickling or Burghley House and taking over the place for an extended, three-day weekend. There’s nothing better than having all your guests surrounding you for an extended period, allowing everyone to catch-up beforehand and debrief the day after, allowing them to focus solely on your wedding in the middle.

With great country house wedding venues come a host of fantastic activities, so whether you want to indulge in some pre-nuptial shooting or a spot of relaxed croquet on the lawn beneath the shadows of your chosen stately home, you won’t be at a loss for things to keep you and your guests entertained throughout the weekend.

When it comes to the wedding itself, you will find that stately homes lend themselves to large celebrations as their large, airy rooms were designed with entertaining, balls and parties in mind. This will allow your wedding part to flow much more easily through the space whilst also giving you a phenomenally beautiful backdrop to your day.

In fact, that backdrop it the other reason we love working on weddings at stately homes. The existing décor is often exquisite and ornate, whilst the extant furniture adds not only luxury but history to the celebrations. All of this means that it makes it much easier to style a wedding when there is already a beautiful palette and extraordinary details to work from and compliment.

You may find that if you opt for a country house wedding, the venue itself becomes your inspiration for other elements of the day. Whether it’s the primary colours used within your function rooms that influence your colour scheme for the day, or architectural details that inform your wedding stationery, you’ll have an almost bottomless well of elements to inform your vision.

Then there are the beautiful grounds of course. If you’re lucky enough to hire a house with gardens designed by great landscape architects such as Capability Brown, you may find that once you step outside for photographs you are so spoilt for choice that you don’t want to go back indoors!

Despite being somewhat remote by their very nature, a great deal of these country estates are sprinkled with a host of accommodation that will be suitable for your guests. Have a look for converted cottages on the estate in order to offer your guests a romantic retreat within the grounds and scope out the local villages, which are likely to have been part of the estate and may hold hidden gems in terms of B&Bs, boutique hotels and rental houses.

For an undoubtedly lavish celebration, you can’t go wrong with a stately home wedding. The rise in weddings at Highclere Castle after Downton Abbey brought it to prominence is indicative of how dearly we still hold these titan houses to our hearts.

By Julia Dowling