It is easy to fall in love with a stunning ceremony backdrop, a beautiful airy room or dramatic window, but for guests, it’s the exterior of a building that forms their first impression of the event. Their experience of finding the venue, the entrance and even the neighbourhood will have an impact on their experience, and you want that to be as positive as possible.
Signposting Your Venue
Guests arriving for a wedding want it to be as easy as possible to find their way around the venue and particularly to key locations like ceremony rooms and bar areas. If your venue doesn’t have appropriate or sufficient signage, source your own wedding decorations online. Banners, flags and signs suspended from shepherd hooks can all help guests to navigate around your venue and enable you to stamp your personal scheme on the exterior as well as the interior.
First and foremost, make sure that it’s obvious where they should enter the building. Clever use of lighting and flowers can help to emphasise entrances and routes around a large venue. Use symmetry and try placing pairs of candles in hurricane lamps either side of each doorway, or fill tall urns with real, paper or silk flowers. To mark out routes, consider using wholesale wedding decorations such as petals scattered as a pathway for guests to follow to enter the building. Not only does this improve navigation around your venue, it also sets a romantic and dramatic scene.
Improving That First Impression
It may be that the stunning and unique interior of your venue caused you to overlook challenging aspects of its exterior. While there is a limit to what wedding supplies can achieve, surprisingly affordable fabrics bought in bulk can be used to good effect to disguise ugly windows, walls or doors. Most venues will have tight rules on how such things can be installed and this is only an option when you have an entire venue hired for your occasion, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
In benign weather conditions, fabric draped over windows or walls doesn’t require permanent fastenings and can be put in place relatively quickly. Aim for a luxurious swagged and draped appearance, softening harsh lines and shapes.
Trick Of The Light
Clever use of lighting is an under-utilised design trick for weddings. Use battery-operated fairy lights or tea lights to draw attention to the features outside your venue that you love and downplay those that you would rather hide. As with banners and petals, lights also work as visual signs to guide guests around your venue.
Strings of fairy lights are affordable, easy to get hold of and come in a great range of colours and lengths. Consider wrapping them around balustrades, using them to frame entrance ways or create a pathway of light to your venue’s entrance.
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