The garden hour
Every outdoor venue has one hour when it is unarguably beautiful. Find it, put the ceremony inside it, and half the design problem is already solved.
- Written by
- Fancy Wedding & Event
- Filed under
- Design notes
- Reading time
- 5 min
We visit a garden three times before we design in it, and always at different hours. Not to see the planting — the planting is in the photographs the venue sent — but to find the hour the light comes in low and sideways and the whole place stops looking like a lawn with chairs on it.
In Hanoi in late spring that hour tends to sit between half past four and half past five. It is a narrow window and it moves week to week, so the ceremony time is one of the last things we fix, not one of the first.
Working with what already grows
A garden already has a design. Our job is mostly editing: choosing which of its axes to sit the aisle along, which hedge to borrow as a backdrop, which corner to leave entirely alone so the eye has somewhere to rest. Anything we bring in has to look like it could have been grown there.
The best compliment a garden wedding gets is that nothing looks brought in.
That means local stems, in season, in quantities the garden could plausibly produce. It means linen rather than satin, unglazed rather than mirrored, and a colour range pulled from the planting itself — which is why we photograph the beds on every site visit and design from those photographs rather than from a swatch book.
The contingency nobody sees
Outdoors, the plan that matters is the second one. We build it in full — a covered ceremony position, a wet-weather aisle, a call time by which the decision must be made — and then we never mention it again unless the sky forces us to.
- The call is made four hours out, by one named person, and it is final.
- Both positions are dressed to the same standard, not one properly and one in haste.
- Guests are told once, clearly, and never asked to move twice.
