20 » pink weddings magazine
for those who don’t like heights they give
a comfortng feeling as they pull you in –
you don’t look out over a precipice.
i knew straight away that this would
be just right. the top and lower floor
work brilliantly together, giving you
space to move through the different
segments of the day – ceremony,
recepton, meal, disco – allowing staff to
set the next stage without disturbing
the flow. it was difficult to fault it as a
venue, and it turned out that the direct
opposite of a heritage building, a
gleaming tower, was just the answer.
The building and the
me of year dictated
much of the look of
our ceremony. We
were never going to
be able to compete
with the building –
and why would you
want to!
– so we needed to complement it. Being
February in the city, darker colours
seemed a natural fit. deep purples, ruby
reds and blacks all came to mind
immediately.
in the middle of city offices, wearing
a suit would have made us look like we
were going to work, but jeans were not
the order of the day either. so we looked
at morning dress with tails, which
worked – but i have to say i preferred the
more rarely seen look of the frock coat,
which a winter event could definitely
take. i wanted to bring out the deep reds,
so ended up getng a fantastc outit,
with a red and black silk coat, made up
by a london tailor famous for his work in
the ’60s. it worked well, and i will
treasure it for years to come – and much
like women and their wedding dresses, i
will take being able to fit into it as a mark
that i’m not too out of shape!
From this, everything else flowed
rather well. We knew the building would
need some additonal lightng, and our
event organiser strongly recommended
that we use uplightng. he had some
great kit, so there were colour-changing
lEds in each window around the
building, castng a fascinatng light up the
glass to the top of the dome, illuminatng
the structure in a wonderful way. these
could change colour, so although they
initally started out in the theme colours
for the ceremony and meal, by the tme
of the dancing, they were changing
around to give a real disco feel.
the building again shaped our
choice of flowers. though it sounds daf,
the flower arrangements couldn’t be too
‘floral’, nothing too country wedding. i
wanted something that went with the
soaring architecture and reflected the
colours, and that had an exotc feel. i also
wanted to be able to reuse some of the
flowers from the ceremony for the table
decoraton aferwards, so our florists
returned to do the changeover. initally i
wanted the tables to each have a tall,
almost fantasy tree like decoraton, but
we decided to keep some table
arrangements lower so everyone could
Phil and christian