An Elegant Barnabrow House Wedding with Beautiful Floral Arrangements

From the bride: We mainly wanted the day to be fun, for the atmosphere to be quite casual and laid back, and definitely not reflecting any stress which may have gone into the planning! We were also keen to avoid anything too ‘flashy’. As many of the guests were traveling from England, we also wanted to ensure that there was an Irish feel to the day, without beeing too twee!

What did you want in your dress?

I was aiming for timeless elegance…and I definitely wanted to avoid anything with bare shoulders! Originally I wanted sleeves but found that difficult to find. Also to my surprise, I wasn’t keen on any lace ones that I tried on. So in the end I went for something quite simple and hopefully elegant!

What inspired your day?
I took loads of inspiration from wedding blogs and Pinterest. I only had a shortlist of 8 venues founds on the internet before I could check them out in person, all in one weekend. Barnabrow’s rustic style was exactly in line with my casual low stress vision, and also has a very Irish feel which also fitted the bill. I wanted the flowers to provide all of the colour with the bridesmaid’s dress colour providing a foil to that. We were aiming for a wildflower look for the table flowers and bouquets, while my mum had more of a formal vision for the church flowers. We also wanted our old MGB to play a part in the day so that was a pretty important part of the vision. And I really wanted fairylights so Barnabrow allowed us to install 6 strings of lights suspended from the roof beams, which really added to the ambiance.

Tell us about your details
The table plan was provided by Barnabrow, luckily they had one which was pretty much what I would have chosen! We wanted a cheese cake, but I was surprised to find that cheese suppliers don’t offer to decorate, they just supply the cheese, meaning there is extra work to do on the day to get it put together (we didn’t have a florist who would normally do this I think, so my mum had to decorate it while the champagne reception was going on). I think cheese suppliers are missing a trick as they could charge for this service and I certainly would have paid! We didn’t have favours at all as I am not sure that they are even noticed usually! And we decided to only have a DJ not a band as we decided that a band is not something that adds as much value for guests as it costs. Luckily our DJ was amazing, recommended by many people on facebook after a plea for recommendations.

You favourite part of the day
It would have to be either walking up the aisle (emotional!) or else the dancing – it was amazing to have everyone you love in one room, and the music is all what you’ve chosen! Plus we were very pleased that everyone went a bit mad on the dancefloor which is exactly what we’d hoped for!

Any advice for our planning brides?
Stop procrastinating! Make a list with dates on it and stick to them. In fact put them in your phone as tasks with reminders – & forward load the tasks as the final month goes really quickly and it’s really nice to have everything done in time to have some relaxing time together the week beforehand, and not feel stressed. A top tip here is “Sleep Well“, a sleep hypnosis iPhone app for sorting out sleepless nights, it was amazingly effective for me!
Don’t waste money on things that guests won’t place any value on – there’s no correlation between the cost of the wedding and how much people enjoy it. Above all, relax on the day: if you are stressed, it is really obvious and your guests won’t enjoy themselves as much. Oh and whoever said .5 bottle of wine was the average didn’t know my friends – we drank all of our buffer and I think that was around 1.2 bottle pp!! I definitely advise telling your venue to hold some of your wine back for the toast, you don’t want to run out and have dry glasses, but if you’re on a budget you also don’t want to have to authorise more at that point which will blow your budget.