AdRIAN ANd PAUL
‘ We knew we wanted our day to be unique and special to us, with everything that represented us as a couple.’
I took on the majority of wedding planning, as it’ s not really Paul’ s thing, but luckily we were both very much in agreement on the type of wedding we wanted. It wouldn’ t be in a church for a start, as neither of us are particularly religious – and we knew we it was going to be a considerable size as we have large circles of friends and family. We decided we wanted to only invite those that we see often and socialise with on a regular basis – family included – rather than those whom we only see once in ten years.
We also wanted the whole wedding – ceremony, wedding breakfast, evening reception and accommodation – all in one venue, so a hotel was the obvious choice. It was tricky finding a venue locally, as the majority of our friends had got married in the last few years and we didn’ t want to choose the same place. We also knew we wanted to keep it fairly traditional, with just a few little twists to make it different.
We started looking at venues online that met the criteria we wanted – big enough to accommodate all our guests, not too far away from Leamington Spa( preferably within an hour’ s drive) with accommodation available.
There was an image in our heads of the style of hotel – somewhere with nice large gardens for pictures, somewhere with character but not too old, and with modern furnishings.
We looked at about six places and finally fell in love with Cotswold House Hotel and Spa – a luxury grade-two listed townhouse in the heart of Chipping Campden in the beautiful Cotswolds. It ticked so many boxes for us; we loved the quintessential English style of the market town with its gorgeous Cotswold stone buildings and the venue had large gardens at the rear of the hotel, a stunning variety of rooms and suites with steam showers and private hot tubs, and courtyards and gardens. We could also have different parts of the day taking place in different rooms, as we wanted.
We are both partial to a drink of two, so I came up with the idea of naming our wedding breakfast tables after our favourite drinks. We took it a step further by giving everyone a glass of the drink for the table they were sat on – Cosmopolitans, Malagousia white wine imported from Greece, Independent Warwickshire craft beers and more.
We also had our very own ale, Lloyd-Brown Wedding Brew, made especially for the day by our good friends at Church Farm Brewery, along with badges for the pumps. The guests loved it, as did we, and we even jumped behind the bar to pull a few pints of our own wedding ale.
We chose to have an autumn wedding in October, as the leaves changing colour look beautiful for photos. We were incredibly lucky to have sunshine and blue skies all day long; it was actually just as warm as a summer’ s day and guests were having to remove coats and jackets in the gardens and pull out their sunglasses.
We wanted the style of our ceremony to remain classic, yet modern, to fit with the venue. Flowers were tricky as neither of us is particularly green fingered and we didn’ t want it to be to feminine. Luckily there was a florist just a few doors
34 » pink weddings magazine