UK Archives - Page 59 of 60 - Smashing the Glass

Sarah & Ben | Vintage Tea Party Jewish Wedding at London Zoo

20/08/2013 by Karen

Now this is a wedding that I seriously would have LOVED to have attended. It’s so different, so creative and incredible fun. I mean what could be better than a vintage tea party at London Zoo culminating in an outdoor Jewish dancing session and big party (not forgetting a drunken guest attempting to climb into the gorilla enclosure!)?

Just scroll down and you’ll see the bride arriving in a flower-bedecked Karma Kab, the groom arriving by canal boat, a seriously jaw-dropping vintage styled bride, a hand-drawn animal-themed ketubah, stunning photography by Steve Poole and David Klein that captures some of the most amazing Jewish dancing energy I’ve ever seen, and on top of everything this report is a little bit special as not only do we hear from Sarah, the bride, there is also a bit of commentary thrown in now and again from our groom, Ben. A Smashing The Glass first! The idea for holding their wedding at such an unusual venue was triggered by Ben proposing to Sarah in the Penguin Pool building…. aaaah, I’ll let Ben take over from here:

IMAGERY BY STEVE POOLE UNLESS OTHERWISE CREDITED

WHY WE CHOSE LONDON ZOO
Ben, the Groom: I proposed to Sarah at London Zoo as when she was a child she wrote to Jim’ll Fix It to ask him to let her into to the zoo’s penguin pool building. She loved the architecture as a little girl – that space age type of feel – and she was a bit besotted with the building. When I proposed to her I organised with the zoo to take her round and then led her into the Penguin Pool building and proposed to her in there.

We also knew that we didn’t want a party in a hotel or ballroom, and we ideally loved the idea of getting married somewhere outdoors, but finding an outdoor London venue that could hold 250 guests for both the chuppah and the party on the same site, and that could also incorporate a kosher caterer didn’t leave us with many choices. Luckily London Zoo ticked all the boxes and we chose it as our wedding ceremony and party venue.

THEME
Sarah, the Bride: We knew that we wanted to have a summer fete / vintage tea party feel and that really worked in the beautiful garden terrace where we held the chuppah and Jewish dancing. We were fortunate enough to have an amazing, sunny day and the space couldn’t have worked out better for us.

Sara & Elliot | Scottish Castle Jewish Wedding, Dundas Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland

12/08/2013 by Karen

In today’s castle weekend wedding we have bagpipe players, custom made Gina shoes, a seriously breathtaking castle venue, and the best favours / name plates I have ever seen: personalised tubes of chocolate Rolos with each guests’ name on them. I’d have loved one of those!

For this wedding, I’m thrilled to welcome photographer extraodinaire, Claudine Hartzel, to Smashing The Glass whose wonderful images capture the occasion perfectly. Happy Monday all, I know you’re going to enjoy this one.

VENUE
Sara, the Bride: We didn’t want a typical “Jewish Wedding” as we both aren’t religious. We wanted something different and also wanted to try and make a weekend of it. We didn’t wanted to get married in London and had gone to Edinburgh for Hogmanay in 2009 and loved it there. I started to research castles and stately homes to get married in in Scotland, Ireland, France and Italy.
Dundas Castle in Edinburgh was the first venue that appeared in my search and nothing else came close to it. When we visited it, we both fell in love with the Castle and not just because everyone who worked there was incredible and couldn’t do enough to help, which made organising a wedding quite far from where you live hardly stressful at all!

CEREMONY Our Rabbi had us facing the guests during the whole ceremony which was lovely albeit a bit scary! We didn’t know he was going to do this and had he suggested this beforehand, I probably would have said no, but in the end it was a very special touch. We wanted our wedding to be really modern and not be long and bore anyone but also have some traditional touches like me walking around Elliot seven times (with the giggles!).

For me, my favourite part of the ceremony was the badeken as it was so personal and emotional. Also our Rabbi was amazing with his brilliant sense of humour, his personality and the most incredible voice you have ever heard. I don’t think there was a dry eye whilst he sang.

Rachel & Emile | Moroccan Themed Jewish Engagement Party in London

24/07/2013 by Karen

I normally only like to focus on weddings here on Smashing The Glass, hence the name of the blog, but this Moroccan themed engagement party and Blake Ezra‘s amazingly energetic photos from the occasion swayed me into sharing it with you.

From the spirited dancing to the authentic Moroccan decor to the colourful traditional henna ceremony there’s lots of lovely personality, tradition and detail to focus on at this engagement party extraordinaire.

Rachel, a teacher from Melbourne, and Emile, an online marketer, met two years ago when Rachel moved into a flatshare in Hendon when she had just arrived in London. The room that she had moved into was actually Emile’s old one. After two days of being in the new apartment her housemates threw a party and at that party she met Emile although they didn’t actually start dating till about 5 months later.

The couple got engaged in December 2012 and threw their (what can only be described as ‘mini-wedding’) Moroccan engagement and henna party in May of this year. I’ll hand you over to Rachel now for all the juicy details but before I do I’ll just give you a little background as to what a ‘henna’ is.

Image: Henna By Sienna

WHAT IS A HENNA?
The henna ceremony is a cultural and spiritual celebration practised mainly amongst Sephardi Jews that is supped to bring good luck to the engaged couple. It involves crushing the leaves of the henna plant into a powder, which, when mixed with water, becomes a dough that stains the skin orange. The henna is arranged in intricate lacey or floral patterns on the hands or feet, and symbolises good health, fertility, wisdom, protection or spiritual enlightenment.

Rachel: I’m an Australian from Melbourne and have been living in the UK for two and a half years now. Emile is British but his dad is Moroccan Israeli so that’s where the Henna ceremony/ party would definitely have had to come in either way. We had to make a decision on which country to have the wedding in and we decided to do it in Australia in March 2014. So having a big engagement party in London incorporating a henna ceremony made perfect sense as we could have all our British and international guests who may very well not be able to get to Australia for the wedding, celebrate with us at a big fun affair too.

INTERNATIONAL GUESTS
Emile’s dad had over 20 of his relatives fly in from Israel for the week and I had my parents come in from Australia. Emile and I both had family from Canada and New York celebrate with us too and we couldn’t have been more thrilled to have such an international array of family and friends have a ball with us at our London engagement party.

I have to admit it felt like a mini wedding – it was the ‘London leg’ as it were. We loved that everyone could feel part of a big celebration no matter what country they were in.

INVITATIONS
With so many foreign guests to invite we thought that using Paperless Post for our invitations would be a good idea. It’s a great service as you can customise the invitation however you want and then you can really stay on top of things with all the RSVPs and messages. We didn’t need to worry about a designer, printing, postage or addresses or RSVPs getting lost in the mail. We loved it!

VENUE
We wanted to hold the party somewhere local that would be easy to get to and big enough to house our 200+ guests. Kinloss Hall was a blank canvas and we loved the fact that we could dress up the room to the degree that we needed to.
DECOR
Being an authentic Moroccan, Emile’s dad had a vision of how he wanted the room to be set out. He arranged palm trees and lanterns and pouffes and all kinds of fabulous Moroccan props. We didn’t have to hire anything – all the stuff is within Emile’s family – so it was all totally authentic. We weren’t pretending to do a Moroccan party. It was a genuine Moroccan party!

Lee & Gary | Show-Stopping Jewish Wedding at The Criterion, London

16/07/2013 by Karen

Lee and Gary married at the gorgeously opulent Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly, London. And when I say opulent, I’m talking a sumptuous neo-Byzantine Piccadilly haven with marble walls, decorative archways and a glorious golden mosaic ceiling.

And that’s not the only reason I’m excited to feature this wedding. You see I’m also totally in love with Lee’s couture dress and head piece which she designed herself. AND the fact that Le Gateau Chocolat, the big black transvestite opera-singer, with a penchant for being wrapped in body-hugging glittery lycra, performed at this wedding!

So here’s their story: Although this gorgeous couple are both Jewish, Lee (a former fashion designer, now a full-time mummy) and Gary, a barrister, are both, in their own words, “devout atheists”. Even so, both felt a need for some familiar cultural background in a partner and ended up finding each other on the Jewish dating site, JDate.

I’ll now hand over to Lee with all the delicious detail from the day:

VENUE + DECOR
Lee, the Bride: Gary, my then fiancà©, had been to The Criterion Restaurant before and knowing my love for art deco, thought I might like it. He literally thought of it the day after he proposed (which by the way completely flew over my head as he did it in his usual verbally subtle way!) We were on holiday at the time and arranged to see the venue a few days after our return over lunch. The moment we sat down and took the place in, we knew we needn’t look any further.

With such a beautiful venue choice, we didn’t need or want a theme or colour scheme as we didn’t want to detract from the beauty of the room with many other colours. Our floral and table layouts were fairly clean and simple too, with a combination of old school & clean modern – just how we like it!

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!

Share this post:

Share this post:

Share this post:

Share this post:

Share this post: