Choosing a Site and Look

Beautiful surroundings and decorations are part of most brides' wedding fantasies. Your wedding and celebration sites have more decorative impact than any other choice.


Sites
Here are a few of today's most common site selections:

• Your own home or apartment, or that of a family member or friend
  
• Sumptuous private mansions
  
• Gracious country clubs
  
• City-, county- or town-maintained parks and clubhouses
  
• Well-decorated catering halls known for excellent food
  
• Hotel ballrooms or smaller spaces
  
• Trendy restaurants
  
• Backyard tents
  
• Sophisticated gallery spaces and arts clubs
  
• Country inns, small-town hotels and restaurants
  
• Party rooms
  
• Museums, building lobbies
  
• Outdoor dining halls, hilltops, meadows
  

Remember that the range of styles between a small and large space is vast. Intimate spaces can be high-ceilinged with gilt pillars. Ballrooms can be small and simply designed without a single beaux arts design element, or they can be as elaborate as a Middle Eastern bazaar. Tent and mansion weddings can have an extravagant feeling, given the right menu, food service, and florist or designer. Galleries feel urban and sophisticated, and hotels can provide all kinds of decorative elements in their choice of room sizes and styles.


Flowers

Once you've chosen the perfect wedding site, the next decorative elements to consider are the flowers and linens. Make sure your favorite flowers are in season. It sounds so basic, one floral designer said, "but if you want lilacs and peonies, don't think of being married anytime other than spring."

For weddings, nothing more
than a subtle decorative idea
is needed. The wedding itself
is the essential theme.

Expect to spend about half of your flower costs on labor. Labor starts with the ordering of the flowers (make sure you choose a florist that can get any kind of blossoms you require). Next, the flowers are prepped. In some cases, flowers are nursed to their peak size and condition over days of conditioning. Finally, in the most obvious step that consumers see, the flowers are arranged to show off their beauty.

Don't forget the delivery and setup of the fragile flowers. After the wedding, all rented items such as vases, baskets, risers, lighting and canopies are picked up and returned to the florist.


Themes

To create memorable parties, many professional planners establish a theme that influences their choices of food and decor. For weddings, nothing more than a subtle decorative idea or theme is needed -- a spring garden or an Italian vineyard. The bride who drapes her ballroom ceiling with acres of blue cheesecloth and hangs stars from it is probably reaching for overstatement.

The wedding is the essential theme. Surround yourself with what you love: Gilt pillars or architectural simplicity, a pretty space that means something to you, or, more dramatically, a view of water or a sacred grove of oak trees. That, with the wedding's iconic symbols, is theme enough.