Creating the Perfect Home Wedding

Even with the state of the world, love isn’t canceled. A home wedding can be a wonderful event. If the home is accommodating enough with plenty of outdoor space, having a wedding ceremony and reception at a home – whether it belongs to one of your families or some extremely gracious friends – can be an enchanting option. But, unless you’re planning on an intimate celebration for very few guests, it is not the same – or as simple – as just opening your home for a party.

Our team of certified wedding planners have planned numerous home weddings over the years, from intimate affairs to soirees for 400+ on land where we built the “venue” from scratch. We are excited to share some tips, tricks and best practices when it comes to planning a home wedding. We’ve broken this into a three-part series and this first installment gives you some of the most crucial details to think about when considering a home wedding! There are a multitude of logistical considerations you’ll want to spend time pondering before you make the commitment to a home wedding. Below is a list of several – but not all – of them:

Space

For setup, breakdown, storage, layout and flow of ceremony and reception and for the wedding party to get ready and wait for ceremony to start

Parking
Valet vs. self parking, potential need for permits, room enough for all the cars and neighborhood issues

Necessities
Power, restrooms, trash, security

Rentals
Consider all that you might need: tent, furniture, linens, glassware, flatware, plates, food service items

Catering/Staffing
Timing, refrigeration, heating, staging, set-up, serving, clean-up
Again, these are just a few of the logistics to consider. To drill down on these issues a little, in the coming weeks, we will share our top five do’s, followed by our top five don’ts when it comes to home weddings and particularly, receptions.

And if the idea of weighing the pros and cons of a home wedding overwhelm you, make an appointment with our experienced wedding planners to learn how they can help walk you though the process – and you’ll have fun along the way!

We LOVE monograms! Simply adore them and truly cannot get enough of them! We love how easy for couples it makes personalizing their weddings merely by incorporating a monogram, their initials and/or names or even a custom wedding logo into their wedding day design. And while it’s historically known as a southern thing, and monograms have been big here…well, pretty much always…this unique twist to weddings just keeps spreading as more and more couples across the country are using them for their big day.

We’ve planned several weddings in recent times where we’ve incorporated such personalization, and part of the fun is coming up with all of the ways or places you can use them! Here are some of our favorite examples:

We put this couple’s initials on their invitation, their joint monogram on their cake (which also had a gorgeous initial topper!) and their last name initial on their reception dinner menu. But our favorite personalized element of this wedding is that stunning monogrammed aisle runner!

For this couple, we included their first name initials on their wedding program, put a gorgeous monogram gobo on their dance floor and included that same joint monogram on their reception menus and even their photo booth strips!

This couple wanted an eclectic mix of personalization, so their cake showcased their married surname initial, the dance floor gobo showed that initial along with their first names and their table cards included their first name initials. We tied them all together by using the same scrolled oval frame around each element.

Do you brides love monograms as much as we do? Are any of you planning to incorporate them in your wedding day décor?