A Pretty, Chic & Rustic Spring Wedding: Susie & Dan

You might need to get yourself comfy for this one! Today’s gorgeous real wedding is EPIC! Susie & Dan had a very pretty and incredibly chic spring wedding with lots of pretty rustic details. Susie being a designer means that this wedding is jam packed with gorgeous detail, I am sure you’re going to LOVE it.

Words by Susie.

We married at Langshott Manor House Hotel, it’s an exquisite boutique hotel in Surrey.

After looking around larger venue’s that felt cold & stark, we immediately fell in-love with this small beautifully restored  Elizabethan 16^th Century Hotel for its ‘Old Englande’ historic look complete with bell tower & intimate setting, with many of the rooms having original features, stain-glass windows, roaring fires & cosy candle lit corners, it had the perfect elegance & atmosphere for our big day.

We had visited the Manor house prior to booking it for our wedding & knew the food is refined & service was impeccable. Quality over quantity was a very important consideration for us. With only 22 bedrooms we had exclusivity of the hotel, sharing it with our closest & dearest.

The Manor house also boasts beautiful grounds & has its own moat to add to its charm. Luckily, our fingers & toes crossed did paid off & we were blessed with a sunny spring day, so the reception drinks flowed in the well-kept gardens.

I also fell in-love with the bridal suite, we chose ‘Henry VIII’ room, which had a Four-poster bed, very private balcony that looks out over the moat, a real log fire & roll –top bath – what more could a bride ask for.

After 11 shops visited & around 150 dresses tried on, It was such a relief to me as soon as I tried on ‘Bella’ by the Australian designer Sarah Janks. What seemed like the 151th dress I’d tried on, I finally felt I had found the dress. I LOVE BELLA.

I think it was it’s effortless simplicity & elegance that won it for me. Often the sales woman would put me in a dress with too much detailing or large puffy underskirt tulle, but because of my petite frame I often feel less is more.

I also think its about the overall look, there are the shoes, the clutch & other accessories to consider, & all needs to work in harmony together. So, Bella was the perfectly elegant canvas. A straight-cut gown made of silk, it felt amazing to wear with its dramatic long train – it made me feel like a movie star.

My make-up was flawless & lasted all day & my hair was just what I wanted, a loose Hollywood curl, nothing to controlled. My make-up artist Gemma made me look the best I have ever looked. The bridesmaid’s hair-do’s were beautiful also, with so many compliments from the guests, we couldn’t thank Gemma enough.

Dan bought me Chanel No.5 parfum to wear on our wedding day. I had never owed a parfum before, always eau de perfume, so it was a special gift, I love it, it’s so timeless & very feminine.

I wanted a couple of looks during the day.

So, for the ceremony & reception, I coupled a gorgeous pair of clear & green crystal vintage antique earrings with a classic Hollywood Cygnet feather Ivory stole from Jenny Packham.

Then, for the evening, I replaced the vintage earrings with a statement necklace by the fabulous Tom Binn’s called ‘Pearls in Peril’, a multi-strand necklace embellished with swarovski crystals & pearls all tangled up. I paired this with a stunning crystal & rhodium plated clutch by By Kenny Ma. The necklace & clutch work so well together – creating the perfect glamorous look for the party.

I am definitely a shoes & bag sort of girl, so even when I was considering my dress, my shoe choice had already played a major factor.

I thought Aruna Seth’s Faralla shoes were so glamorous & made me feel like Cinderella for a day, I absolutely loved slipping my feet into these beauties and butterflies are apparently good-luck at a wedding, so that was just an added bonus.

Dan wore a custom made suit by Suit Supply with Tom Smith cufflinks.

We made all the chalkboards ourselves. We found old vintage frames on ebay & Dan cut the wood insert and we painted these with chalkboard paint.

I did all the writing by hand & the font matched that of our invites & menu’s & so forth. We created a welcome message at the front of the venue & one in the ceremony room invited guests to take their seats, it said, ‘Friends of the Bride, friends of the Groom, please sit together, there is plenty of room.

We also created smaller chalkboards inviting guests to take a hankie if they needed one, ‘Hankies for the Tears of Joy’, & for the card box. We also made out table plan using the same effect, using a large vintage gold frame & adding Katherine’s gorgeous wreath it looked stunning & I was really pleased with the outcome.

I bought a mixture of confetti matching my chosen colours, rustic pinks & greens. I purchased the confetti mix from Confetti Direct. The confetti cones were lovely white doilies from Flowerfetti on Etsy, I combined the delicate confetti cones with a vintage style trug tray, which I purchased from Not-On-The-Highstreet.

This was placed on an upside-down French vintage apple crate.  The venue placed this outside the Manor House & as we took our first steps as a married couple the bells in the bell tower rang & our guest covered us in confetti. It was an unforgettable moment.

I chose Renza from Delicieux Cakes to make our wedding cakes, as I loved her creativity & her cakes taste absolutely amazing. I wanted a simple cake with a bit of surprise, so after much thought we opted for a vanilla butter-cream rough iced three tier cake with a rainbow pink sombre sponge inside.

I didn’t quite manage to cut it neatly though to show off the lovely rainbow effect, but it did taste amazing & our guest commented on how tasty it was. We topped it off by adding ‘Just Married’ bunting. Our cake stand was a pedestal crystal glass vintage cake stand from the The Roche Studio.

Katherine (Florist in the Forest) added a delightful vintage china tea-pot & a tea-cup to either side of the cake stand, these were filled with Spanish moss Peonies & Roses. These were a lovely addition to the rustic cake stand & crate setting.

I booked Katherine a year prior to the wedding, as I knew it could be hard to find a good florist, one with the right style in mind. When we met back in April 2013, I knew exactly what I wanted & Katherine delivered my vision perfectly a full year later.

Spring flowers are my absolute favourite flowers, so I was in my element picking the flowers with Katherine. I chose a mix of delicate spring flowers, Ranunculus, Anemones combined with Peonies & Memory Lane Roses, in rustic pinks, vesty greens & shades of white.

In my bouquet we also included dried Scabious seed heads & contorted Willow, which was a nice contrast to my bridesmaid’s softer bouquets & flower girls posies. All were tied with delicate light grey lace purchase from AlisaMayde on Etsy.

Katherine created lovely delicate flower circlets for the flower girls, these included Jasmine, Wax flowers & Spray Roses. These looked absolutely stunning on all the girls, they looked like little angels.

My father walked me down the aisle to the ‘Balcony Scene’ by Craig Armstrong, from Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’. To me this song epitomizes love.

Romeo & Juliet has to be one of the most romantic love stories but also Baz Luhrmann’s motion picture has one of the most romantic scene’s in history, when Romeo & Juliet catch sight of each other for the first time, gazing through the fish tank. This song reminds me of that scene.

During our ceremony, Dan & I decided to write letters to each other, we used these instead of typical ceremony readings.  We felt that would be a more intimate & personal for our ceremony, these were very short letters explaining to each other why we loved the other.

We asked Dan’s auntie & one of my closest friends to read these out for us. That was a pretty emotional moment for us & our guests also mentioned that they found it very touching.

A mixture of vintage vases & old medicine bottles were clustered around the ceremony table, along the windowsills & scattered across the fireplace mantels at the venue. These clusters were filled with varied flowers from our bouquets, Peonies, Ranunculus, Roses & Astibe to name a few.

The confetti throwing was so much fun & having all your friends & family cheering around you is an unforgettable moment.

Katherine created the most beautiful garland of flowers & foliage to sit around one corner of our table plan. I absolutely loved this!

We used miniature glass medicine bottles found online, we filled these with Talisker Whiskey for the gents, & Disaronno Amaretto for the ladies.

We tied burlap twine string around them with the labels ‘Drink me’ & ‘A Little Tipple’ that I created for the finished effect. I thought these looked perfectly rustic & they were clearly enjoyed.

I bought these gorgeous silver mercury recycled glass bud vases from Nkuku. I used them to create place names for each guest for the wedding breakfast. Creating the labels myself, my bridesmaids & I attached them with the delicate light grey that matched our bouquets.

Then Katherine (our florist) added the small mixed flowers. I loved these, I thought it was a lovely idea that each guest could take their own flowers & budvase away with them & this also doubled up as a place setting.

Renza from Delicieux Cakes created these gorgeously sweet mini sponges, topped off with wild berries.  Each one looked so sweetly seductive, we finished these mini rustic sponges off with handmade cake toppers saying ‘Eat Me’ & ‘Love is Sweet’.

I created the cake toppers by simply using a label punch to create the shape & then attached them to cocktail sticks, & added a little bit of glitter & lace for the perfect finish.

For our main centrepieces we decided on tall silver candelabra with a sphere of flowers at the top. These spheres included Peonies, Rose’s, Ranunculus, Anemones & Hydrangea’s.

I accompanied the centrepieces with perfectly formed freeze-dried pink rose & green Hydrangea’s petals scattered around the base of the candelabra. The petals were from The Confetti Cone Company – Etsy. We chose none drip grey dove dinner candles, these we purchased from Nordic House.

I bought a gorgeous wooden handmade card box from etsy with forever & always carved onto it. I added bunting for a more rustic look.

We had a Poster Matt signature board made by mounting a photo from our pre-wedding shoot by our photographer Brett Symes.

We simply had the print framed without inserting the glass, allowing our guests to sign the mount board & leave us some words of wisdom.

Our wedding photographer Brett made us both feel at ease straight away when we first met him in September 2013. We visited Bristol for our pre-wedding shoot & we were both a little awkward, but Brett automatically makes it fun & we were blown away by his results.

Brett is such a true talent & at the same-time a genuinely nice guy & down to earth. It was great to spend our wedding day with him, he breezes in & out of rooms & at times I didn’t even notice him, but there he was snapping away crawling on the floor, capturing every little detail.

Brett, captures light in his photos in such an amazing way, he chases it. He is incredibly hard working & a perfectionist. We were extremely lucky to have had Brett shoot our wedding photography!

We bought an old 1940’s typewriter of ebay, we placed this on a desk & set this up as our guestbook at the entrance to the Manor house, with instructions on how to use & a note saying ‘leave us a little love note’.

Accompanied with budvases, tea-lights & guestbook bunting, this typewriter worked really well as an alternative to a traditional guestbook. We were amazed to see how many of our guest had left us a note & they clearly had a lot of fun with it. It was lovely to read all the messages after the big day.

We wanted a first dance song that was emotionally personal to us, not a conventional & typical first dance song that was just a crowd pleaser & had no meaning for us. We listened to Lana Del Ray on our first road trip together, so we both shared a lovely memory & affection for that particular artist. Her vocals are so slow and smouldering.

Although, ‘Young & beautiful’ is a relatively new song, the chorus is so decadent, full of burning desire;

‘Will you still love me – When I’m no longer young & beautiful?… I know you will, I know you will’.

Then the bridge is so hauntingly romantic. We just both utterly loved it!

Want to see even more of that gorgeous detail?

As a designer I designed all the Invites, Save the Dates, Menus, Order of the Day & created all the wedding day messaging, chalk boards & decorations myself.

I wanted to create invites that were unique but also very personal to us. So, we took a series of photos of us together in different poses, then I used these to create a series of watercolour style illustrations, so each Save the date, invite, menu, rsvp had a different illustration of us on then.

To accompany these invites I found seeded envelopes, that when planted in a little soil – wild flowers grow. I thought this was a perfect as we were having a spring wedding & I tied this in throughout the stationary. So, the ‘Save the Date’ said ‘Just Planting a Little Seed’, then the invite messaging was ‘Our Love Grew’.

I am utterly in love with Susie & Dan’s wedding, so much rustic pretty and adorably chic detailing! And don’t they makes such a gorgeous couple?! I’m completely with Susie too on accessorizing your wedding gown to the max, her statement necklace was just WOW.

The idea of writing love letters to each other and then having them read out at your ceremony is such a sweet and sentimental touch! It must have been such an emotional moment for Susie & Dan.

I hope you feel as inspired by this beautiful wedding as I do? Please do leave lots of love and congrats for our gorgeous bride and groom, and of course, their incredibly talented wedding photographer, Brett Symes. Beautiful images, loving that light!

wedding credits | photographer: brett symes | venue: langshott manor house hotel | brides dress: ‘bella’ by australian designer sarah janks | brides shoes: aruna seth ‘farfalla’ | brides accessories: cygnet feather ivory stole: jenny packham, vintage earrings: hirst antiques in notting hill, portobello market, necklace: ‘pearls in peril’ tom binns | flower girl dresses: monsoon | florist: florist in the forest | bridesmaid dresses: weddington way | make-up artist: gemma sutton | wedding cake: delicieux cakes | stationery: the bride

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