Modern Day London Fairytale Wedding With Golden Luxe Edge

Emily & Steve Photography

April 8, 2018

Jess and Paul’s wedding is a modern day London fairytale. Their autumnal celebration featured a lot of gorgeous and delicate gold elements with splashes of pink, beautifully simple single-stem bouquets, and a plethora of incredible suppliers local to Islington, where they first meet for a date night after work.

With Jess’ love of bright colours and a ‘more is more’ attitude but Paul being a true minimalist, the planning involved a lot of stylistic compromise. A lot of the original inspiration was drawn from Jess’ stunning Claire Pettibone dress and its decadent gold embroidery, and her incredible golden-lobster-adorned Kurt Geiger flats – which I’ve totally fallen in love with, FYI. Her gorgeous headpiece was actually a necklace from John Lewis which cost £15 and her my mum turned it into a headpiece by using gold wire to attach to a hairband from Claire’s Accessories!

“We also knew from the start that we wanted to get marred in Islington, and I don’t think it could have been a more ‘Islington wedding’ if it tried!” Jess began. “Our ceremony was held in the Council Chamber in Islington Town Hall, a horseshoe-shaped room that gave everyone a good view and felt very intimate. Its wood finish and stained glass windows meant it was probably the most traditional element of our whole day but we knew it would please our relatives from overseas with its quintessential Britishness.”

“Our reception venue was The Dead Dolls House, which is literally just across the road. It’s a beautiful place that hardly needed any decoration – it has everything from candelabras to a disco ball to fairy lights in the ballroom, which made it the perfect backdrop for our wedding and was one of the main reasons I wanted this space!” It also featured illustrated walls and matches its appearance with its food offerings: Guests enjoyed a three-course family-style feast on long trestle tables adorned with taper candles.”

“I did spend a whole week carrying heavy pumpkins home on the bus every night after work for spray painting”, she laughed when speaking about their DIY efforts, “but the next morning I discovered that all the paint had completely cracked! In the end, we just had to throw half of them away and just own the shabby chic vibe with the ones that weren’t too cracked. Luckily we actually ended up getting a lot of compliments on them!”

“The whole day was very natural and a lot of fun – we had little ‘drink me’ vouchers so guests could get pink ombré cocktails from the bar and a small retro photo booth that instantly printed pictures for guests to either leave in our guestbook or take home and keep. We also made our own playlists on Spotify, with Motown for cocktail hour, soft indie for dinner and then disco for the evening.”

Natural, fun, and effortlessly cool seems to have been the order of the day for this achingly stylish couple. “I think what made our day look and feel very special was a series of small conscious decisions like black bridesmaid dresses, a splash of pink in our amazing cake from Blossom and Crumb, and single flower bouquets. My bouquet was a King Protea plant and each bridesmaid had just a simple white rose. We all had such amazing dresses I just didn’t want them to be overpowered by a big bouquet so I decided to keep it simple but still feel like the flowers had a lot of impact.”

Emily and Steve Photography managed to catch this chilled out vibe perfectly, from those rich, fiercely emotional ceremony shots to the dreamy portraits outside and the sumptuous lighting inside the Dead Dolls House. “Alongside their incredible candid style, we really liked the fact that Emily and Steve are a real life married couple! They were a great support to both of us on the day and also during the build up and made the whole process really fun and stress-free. They blended seamlessly with all our guests and completely made our day, resulting in so many wonderful surprises when we were going through our photos. They were also responsible for our favourite part of the day, when we had our photos taken as just the two of us after the ceremony. It felt like we could finally just relax and breathe and take in what had just happened. The photos we took in the park are my favourite because its an area we’ve walked past so many times before, that now feels special.”

For a wedding that was so beautifully simple, understated and natural, there is SO much to love about it that I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe it’s because I live in Islington and have fallen in love with it and its love stories, maybe it’s because I think that’s the most incredible wedding dress-and-shoe-combo I’ve ever seen, maybe it’s because, y’know, I’m human and I have eyes and it is just a visual heaven – but this is an absolute STUNNER. Off to go build a whole Pinterest board of single stem bouquets now…

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