One Marylebone Wedding Venue Archives - Smashing the Glass

A Jesus Peiro Bride for an Elegant Jewish Wedding with a Roaming Band at New West End Synagogue and One Marylebone, London, UK

27/01/2020 by Karen Cinnamon

We’re super psyched to be featuring our very first Jewish wedding with the amazing acoustic roaming band and Smashing The Glass RecommendedVendor Balagan! This incredible group – formed by another beloved Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor, Sensation Band (who also performed, keeping the dance floor packed all night long in their signature style) – is the UK’s first and only roaming band to offer Jewish sets, and we can’t get enough of the fun, personalized vibe they bring to any big day.

STG Brides Club member Ella, a project manager at a branding and digital agency, and Matt, head of data at a life insurance start-up, say booking Balagan was the best wedding planning decision they made, and we’re not at all surprised – they are a truly incredible group!

And until February 7, you have the chance to enter to win an epic performance from Balagan for your very own wedding! Head over to this post for full details.

So obviously the music at this wedding earns top marks… but believe it or not, that’s only the tip of the iceberg of this wonderful day. First off, we can’t get over the fact that Matt built the couple’s birch wood chuppah as a tribute to his late grandfather who taught him about woodwork (and how sweet is it that after the wedding the pair donated it to a nearby synagogue for other couples who may need it?).

And then there’s Ella’s impeccable bridal style. She found her gorgeous dress at Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor Morgan Davies, who worked with her to combine two Jesus Peiro dresses into the style of her dreams. Ella’s got nothing but rave reviews about the team at Morgan Davies – and the result could not have been any more perfect. We’re also obsessed with the tulle Savannah Miller cape the bride wore to cover her shoulders during the Orthodox ceremony.

Photographer Barney Walters (who the couple found right here on Smashing the Glass) and videographer Ben Foster captured this beautiful wedding so perfectly – it’s really not to be missed. Do read on for Ella’s full writeup – there’s far more good stuff going on than we have room to mention here!

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How We Met

Ella, the bride: Matt and I met on none other than Tinder. When I came across Matt back in 2015, Tinder said we had around 90 friends in common which I assumed was a glitch with the app. It turned out we grew up around a mile away from each other and did have many friends in common. We must have both been at various parties in the past but had never met.

When we matched I messaged two close friends to ask what they thought of him and they both said he was a real mensch. One week later we’d been on our first date and that was that! Because of all of our mutual friends there were definitely more than a few people walking around our wedding claiming that they’d made the shidduch.

A Ritva Westenius bride for a city-chic Interfaith Jewish Wedding at One Marylebone, Central London, UK

19/01/2016 by Karen

Today’s wedding from One Marylebone in the heart of London, is a masterclass in how to ensure your guests enjoy your big day. In particular, it’s an absolute must-read for anyone planning a mixed faith wedding. Lucy’s report is long — there’s no denying it — but it’s brilliantly written and very much worth scrutinising, particularly the section on how she and Matt developed and personalised their ceremony. It’s clear that Lucy’s Jewish faith is culturally and religiously of deep significance to her, and she and Matt (who’s taken to her Jewish-ness like a duck to water!) incorporated so many symbolic and personal details into their celebration.

And I love this…Six weeks before the big day they invited all of Matt’s friends over to their flat, and hosted a small Israeli dancing lesson as many of Matt’s friends had never attended a Jewish wedding before. Such a brilliant and fun idea! As Lucy says, “while there is nothing that can prepare you for the sheer madness of running in circles and being thrown up in the air — it was great that the boys had a vague idea of what was going on so that on the day they knew how to get stuck in!”

The attention to their guests enjoyment didn’t stop there… Lucy and Matt really wanted to let their guests know how happy they were that they were there to share their big day with them. So they hand-wrote 200 (yes 200!) individual cards so that each guest had a personal note waiting for them on their place at the table.

Our bride and groom look impeccable stylish — Lucy in a beautifully cut Ritva Westenius gown, and Matt in a three piece suit by Hackett. And whilst we’re talking fashion can I just be frivolous and say that I am loving the gals’ personalised sports bras!

Photography is by Jez Dickson whose work I’m delighted to be featuring on the blog today.

how we met

Lucy, the Bride: Matt and I met in the summer of 2010, at a club in Putney. We both had other plans, and as two staunch North Londoners neither of us were particularly enamoured with the idea of an evening so far from home! I spotted Matt on the dancefloor and danced near him, within a matter of minutes he had offered to buy me a drink — we sat in the corner nursing a single drink for the next three hours and had our first official date the next day.

On the Sunday he rang his mother and told her that he had met the woman he wanted to marry — she politely reminded him that I may not necessarily feel the same way after one short meeting. Nonetheless, 6 dates and 10 days later he asked me if I would be his girlfriend, after 4 years of dating he asked me to marry him and then 15 months after that we walked down the aisle!

We have never stopped talking or loving spending time with each other — and going south of the river that one night could not have been more worthwhile! Both of us are complete chatterboxes and one of the questions that everyone always asks us is who speaks when we get home? How do either of us get a word in edgeways? But somehow we’ve managed to find the one person that we can sit in silence with.

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Andrew & Elliott | Uber-Stylish Soirée Wedding at One Marylebone, London

11/07/2013 by Karen

Today you lucky readers get not one but two lovely grooms who together organised an incredibly entertaining (think confetti canons, swing band, full-on Shirley Bassey wedding entrance) and glamorous black tie wedding in the heart of London’s West End. Their story is full of phenomenal detail, useful tips, fabulous eye-candy and impeccable style.

Andrew, originally from Australia, is an Operations Director for a boutique London creative agency, and Elliott is a Client Relationship Manager for a global investment manager. They met in Melbourne, whilst Elliott was traveling for work, and the rest, as they say, is history.

With their wedding being very much a joint planning effort (and boy was there a lot of planning), the account of their double groom w-day is recounted in both their words:

AN EXCUSE TO THROW THE BEST PARTY WE COULD IMAGINE
Andrew + Elliott: As well as being a celebration of our Civil Partnership we always wanted our day to be a celebration for our friends and an excuse to throw the best party that we could imagine. For a venue, we imagined a lavish stately home [with Andrew being from Australia, he had always had the grand notion to have a lavish party in a stately home or palace (somewhere older than the 225 years of his colonised country)], but in keeping with the idea of it being a party for friends we were also adamant that we wanted a Central London location so that guests didn’t need to plan accommodation or travel. Free from needing to marry in a “place of worship” we also wanted the ceremony and reception in the same venue so that there was one less travel logistic for our guests and us.

The problem we faced with a lot of the Central London properties available was that they were either sterile, were just another banqueting room in a grand hotel or were private member clubs with dominating dà©cor that would stop any chance of us adding our own personal touches. We started with a list of over 30 properties that could accommodate 100 guests. We researched via the web and various venue guides and then shortlisted around half a dozen that seemed to meet most of our requirements.

Off we trotted to spec out the various venues on the shortlist after work or on weekends. Several we wrote-off without even entering the building, others were excluded because of silly charges and inflexible terms and conditions. One, in particular, we rather liked but we didn’t gel with the event planner — her creativity extended only as far as suggesting neon pink lighting because this was a gay event! We were becoming slightly worried that our expectations were too high. We started to reconsider the stately home alternative. We unconsidered it again and armed with a bottle of wine we sat down and spent another evening reconsidering venues that we had previously ruled out (thinking we should at least go and inspect them as we were only reliant on photos from the web). A late addition was One Marylebone, which a good friend of ours had recommended.

WOWED BY ONE MARYLEBONE
We went to see One Marylebone one wintery evening after a stressful day at work, and apart from being wowed by the beauty of the building we immediately hit it off with Alicia, their fabulous event planner. We’d barely taken our coats off and already her suggestions were filling us with inspiration. We knew there and then that One Marylebone was the right venue — as an event space it was new enough that we would be original, as a venue it is awe inspiring and needs little additional decoration and, above all, we knew Alicia would make our day into what we wanted it to be!