Fran & Reece’s Coastal Wedding at East Afton Farmhouse

Fran & Reece’s September wedding was a light, bright, and modern celebration complete with sunshine florals, garden games (including beer-bobbing, more on that later!) and utterly delicious food provided by their favourite local restaurant.

On meeting at the bottom of the aisle for their ceremony they found themselves in the middle of a big ol’ love bubble, ‘That feeling of all the pre-wedding nervousness and anxiety lifting off of your shoulders and knowing you’re marrying the love of your life is hard to beat!’.

Heart eyes at the ready, let’s dive in…

Fran says…

We always wanted to get married on the Isle of Wight as Reece grew up there and it is a place close to both of our hearts. As soon as we started our search for a wedding venue, East Afton Farmhouse stood out to us as having everything we wanted – a large space that was exclusively ours, the ability to make the venue our own, and a huge added bonus of on-site accommodation for my family and bridal party. When we went to visit we absolutely fell in love with East Afton and were so impressed with Chloe and the events staff that we decided that day to go for it!

My plan was always to have a simple dress that I could accessorise, so I chose the Luna dress from Love Story Bride with a glittery top to go over it for the evening. I didn’t want a veil, so I opted for a pearl cape from an independent store called Blossom and Bluebird. Mine and my bridal party’s hair was done by amazing stylists from Scotts Hair in Ventnor and we were so happy with it, everyone opted for different and individual styles. We all did our own makeup, and I really enjoyed that we all got to sit together around the dining table at East Afton doing our makeup in our matching pjs on the wedding morning!

Reece wore a tailor-made custom suit from Moss Bros, a sky-blue herringbone three piece. He chose this as it perfectly complemented the bridesmaid dresses which had already been chosen from David’s Bridal, and it was the same style as the groomsmen’s suits but a different colour which was a nice way for him to stand out.

Neither of us are particularly creative or gifted when it comes to design so we just wanted to go for something light, bright, and modern. The great thing about East Afton was that we didn’t need to do much in the way of decorating for it to still look amazing! There were a couple of aspects we knew we wanted. Early in our relationship Reece bought me a bouquet of yellow roses which I loved, and this became a bit of a regular theme so we knew we had to have yellow roses in the decor and flowers! The other aim was to include our love of gin in the day. We spent two years in between our engagement and wedding collecting empty bottles of our favourite gin to use as centerpiece decorations – a lot of our family and friends were receiving bottles of gin as birthday and Christmas presents with the express instructions to drink them before September 3rd 2022! And of course we did a lot of the heavy lifting ourselves…

Our florist was Sarah Matthews and Sarah and Jodie were absolutely amazing. They were such a pleasure to work with and bent over backwards for us. We originally saw their work on an Instagram post of another wedding at East Afton where they had put up amazing green foliage draping on the chandeliers in the new barn and we loved it so much we contacted them and asked them to do the same for us! They also gave us beautiful bouquets with the aforementioned yellow roses and lots of bright green foliage and some ceremony flower stands to match. All of the corsages and buttonholes were made to match the roses and looked wonderful, we couldn’t have been happier with the flowers.

Our cake was made by an incredibly talented family friend! It was three tiers – a Victoria sponge, a chocolate orange, and a red velvet cake. Luckily we managed to snack on some offcuts as Sam was getting it ready the day before, because on our wedding day it absolutely disappeared with everyone raving about how good it was!

Our catering was done by our favourite restaurant, the Smoking Lobster. It’s a local Isle of Wight restaurant with sites in Ventnor and Cowed, and an events side of the business. They provided us with canapés and a three course meal for 85 guests. They were great, and the food was incredible – the most common piece of feedback we’ve had from the day was that our food was insanely good!

Sam (from Little Isle Photography) was amazing. They came recommended by East Afton and we are so glad they did because we are so in love with every single one of our wedding pictures! On the day Sam was great at not only getting everyone in place for formal pictures, but capturing all the wonderful candid moments that made the day so special. The beer bobbing set of pictures are a particular highlight! Afterwards it was great to be in touch with Kimmi and we appreciate all her hard work on editing the photos to make them look absolutely fantastic.

BEST PART OF THE DAY

It’s so hard to choose when the whole day was so incredible! I think it was the ceremony which surprised us. We both thought that would be the ‘admin’ part of the day that we just needed to ‘get done’ before the party could start, but when we met each other at the end of the aisle we both got tunnel vision and the only thing we could see was each other and we were just in this complete love bubble getting married! That feeling of all the pre-wedding nervousness and anxiety lifting off of your shoulders and knowing you’re marrying the love of your life is hard to beat!

FROM ONE COUPLE TO ANOTHER

Try not to stress about the small stuff too much – everything will come together in the end and no one will care or remember if you’re running a bit behind schedule, or you’ve forgotten the side salads! And take a moment on the day to stand back and look around together – everything will go by so fast but it’s an amazing feeling to see how your friends and family have all come together to celebrate with you.