A Classy Wedding at Layer Marney Tower

Today’s real wedding has beautiful styling details; from the intricate lace detail on the wedding cake to the pretty floral table arrangements on log slices with pearl strings. Because of the groom’s love of Chelsea, Julie and Martin wanted a splash of blue in their wedding styling, and they found some really cool blue bottled water that did the trick.

Layer Marney Tower, a stunning Tudor palace in Essex, was the setting for Julie and Martin’s big day — and wow, what a venue; just perfect for this classy wedding, photographed beautifully by Jasmine Jade Photography…

“Classy, Fun and Us — that was what we aimed for when panning our wedding. Our theme started with wanting to incorporate Blue for Martin’s love of Chelsea FC, but nothing too obvious. A trip to Barcelona revealed the fabulous Solan de Cabras water bottles were the perfect way to do this; they looked stunning on the tables.

“The rest of the theme came from the invitations, which we chose just because we liked them. They were a chalkboard style and we were able to have signage and our table plan and names made to emulate the same design. The water bottles provided a handy place to hang handwritten chalkboard name labels.

“The ceremony was humanist — very unusual, very personal, and evidently very touching as there was not a dry eye in the house. The flowers for the ceremony were white and simple, a nod to my Italian heritage.

“Because we wanted the day to be a very sociable occasion we didn’t want to block our guests’ views of each other with large centrepieces, so our fabulous florist created a low-level, delicate decoration on top of slices of log that Martin sourced locally. The log slices then also provided handy stands for the self-carve roast beef — the carver of each table was revealed by guests checking under their chairs for the apron!

“One of the highlights of the reception was the quiz about us which produced incredible amounts of banter and bribery amongst the guests, and was more of an ice breaker than we could have imagined!

“Having our son ‘interrupt’ our first dance to join Martin in a break-dance was absolutely amazing and he really was the star of the day.

“Everything from the beautiful blue sky, the gasps of people watching the magician, and the superb fireworks before the bacon butties served from a fairy lit camper van at the end of the evening, made this our perfect wedding to remember forever.”