Rebecca & Benjamin’s Poundon House Wedding

Images by Eneka Stewart.

Rebecca & Benjamin chose Poundon House for their summer marquee wedding, complete with beautiful blooms, gin favours, lots of love and a chicken or two!

All of these shenanigans were beautifully captured by Eneka Stewart Photography.

Enjoy folks…

Notes from the Bride

Rebecca:

My parents own Willis Flowers in Stony Stratford, my Dad mentioned that he’d delivered wedding flowers to Poundon House and that it was absolutely stunning.

We went to their next open day and immediately fell in love. It was the second venue and the last venue that we viewed.

My Maid of Honour and I went to Sin City itself for a real Bachelorette send off into married life and whilst we were there I purchased my wedding shoes from Christian Louboutin, The Forum at Caesers Palace. I mean why not?!

Being a busty Bride, visible cleavage was no no! The Justin Alexander gown that I chose gave me the perfect coverage but still with the satin sweetheart neckline underneath. The full lace gown with satin underlay and chocolate box bow fit perfectly with the classic look we were going for.

When it came to accessories less was more, the dress said all it needed to on its own. I wore a long chain Pandora heart locket that my husband bought me as a gift on the day, I attached Ben’s Grandmas wedding band and a ring that my Nana had bought me when I was 13 to represent the two of them who could not be with us on the day.

I’m an accountant by day but my real dream is to be a wedding planner or an events organiser so, naturally I wanted us to do as much as possible ourselves! Thanks to my Mum, Sister and Maid of Honour we managed it! We had access to the venue from 9am on the Friday morning and we spent about 13 hours dressing the venue, arranging the flowers, setting the tables and just having the time of our lives doing it!

We even made our own wooden signs to go around the grounds of the venue by visiting a local wood salvage yard and hand painting them myself in the month leading up to the wedding. We just had so much fun doing everything!

We are big gin lovers so we decided to kill two birds with one stone and named each table after a different gin and the favours were miniatures of that gin brand. We had Hendricks, Monkey 47, Bloom, Bombay Sapphire, Portobello road, Tanqueray, Whitley Neil, Sipsmith, Greenall, Brokers and we provided bottles of fever tree tonic so everyone could join us in our favourite drink! They went down really well! Some might say too well…

The table plan was my baby, I had been dreaming about this table plan since I had been to a wedding fair and seen something similar! I didn’t want the usual picture frame with the details of each table and I loved the idea of having each table in their own frame and so we bought a load of old crates, stacked them up and draped them with ivy and staggered the frames across the crates.

I have to say me and my Mum spent about an hour putting it all together the day before the wedding and it honestly couldn’t have turned out better. I’ve always been into the odd and the quirky things and a friend of mine hand painted and decorated two roe deer skulls as a bride & groom and they just finished off the table plan perfectly.

I am so lucky to have a family that owns a florist but I don’t have the words to thank my Mum enough for my incredible florals on the day. She worked her absolute heart out, bearing in mind she has had 25 years to plan these wedding flowers she still completely respected the look I was going for and she nailed it.

I wanted a fresh, clean, simple look opting for just ivy and roses and she brought my dream of a full ivy garland to life on the top table.

For my bouquet we used different pastel coloured roses and peonies, now usually peonies aren’t available in August but they are my favourite flowers and my Mum being the amazing person she is did everything she possibly could to source them for the day and we ended up with Sarah Bernhardt peonies and 24 stems of the roses; vintage lilac memory lane, pale pink sweet akito, peach mayfair and pale blue delphinium to match all my bridesmaids dresses.

For the bridesmaids we used a 12 stem bouquet of White avalanche roses and hair combs covered in million stars gypsophila. For the centre pieces we used a mixture of pastel summer flowers using all the same roses as above, lilac trachelium and cream double lizzianthus and pale blue delphinium.

We also decorated the pillars in the marquee by wrapping ivy around them and used miniature foam roses to decorate. We used the foam roses in the plants that were already in the marquee and also used these to wrap around the middle of the chair bows in the marquee and for the ceremony, which we made ourselves out of rolls of white lace.

The cake was made by Teresa and Joanna of Creative Cakes based in Old Stratford. We had 3 tiers of red velvet, madeira and carrot cake with pastel icing topped off with figurines of me, ben and our Staffordshie Bull terrier, Beau.

Our photographer was the absolute star of our day! Eneka was amazing, we warmed to her immediately when we met at a wedding fair and there was no debating over choosing her as our photographer and boy was it a good choice.

She totally got what we were going for, the mix of formal photographs for the family as well as a collection of funny posed ones for us and our friends.

Part way through the evening she ran in and grabbed us “Quick! the sun is setting” she took us to the fields behind the venue and got the most incredible shots of us with the setting sun behind us. I almost feel bad for couples who don’t choose Eneka for their day!

My favourite part of the day was the ceremony itself, seeing each other for the first time and saying our vows. We laughed, we cried and we were husband and wife at the end of it. Perfection.

Words of Wedded Wisdom…

Don’t be frightened by a little DIY! The best part of our wedding was how much we did from scratch ourselves. It will make your day if you get creative and you will feel so proud of what you have achieved!

Keep it personal. Not everyone was as impressed with our gin themed tables and favours as we were but it was something personal to us. Sometimes you just have to remember it’s your day so don’t stress about pleasing everyone.

You won’t!