Hiring a village hall and decorating it yourself is a brilliant, cost-effective option for your special day, allowing you to have the unique and informal wedding you’ve always dreamed of. I’ve photographed many village hall weddings over the years here in the Highlands of Scotland. In this post, I share my experience as a wedding photographer and give you my five top tips on how to decorate a village hall for your wedding.
Village halls are ideally suited to hosting events, often having plenty of space, car parking, and kitchen facilities. They’re typically very affordable too. However, you’ll need to decorate the venue yourself, to transform a functional community space into the elegant, rustic or quirky wedding in your mind’s eye. Inevitably, this will involve a lot of effort, but you’ll have the benefit of starting with a ‘blank canvas’, meaning you have an opportunity to make the space totally unique to your wedding. You can decorate the hall in a way that reflects your personalities, and your guests will love it; it’ll be unlike any other wedding they’ve ever attended!
1. Source Drapes or Voile Panels
Your village hall will likely contain noticeboards and other items belonging to community groups. Some of these will be fixed and will therefore need to be covered up as you decorate the space. Drapes or voile panels will be an excellent way to transform the hall into an elegant setting for your wedding reception. If you’re not allowed to hang anything on the walls, then you could source free-standing drapes.
2. Consider Lighting
Village halls tend to have quite bright lighting, which is fine for the local badminton club, but less than ideal for your wedding! Fairy lights will create the right mood but, on their own, might not be bright enough to illuminate the space and create enough light for your wedding photographer! Mixing fairy lights with uplighting will be ideal for soft, romantic light. Make sure you check how many sockets are available, and ensure there are no trailing cables for your wedding guests to trip over.
3. Choose Personalised Decorations
This is the exciting bit! Choosing decorations is great fun and this is where you can really personalise the space and make it unique to you. Start by choosing a colour scheme and source some bunting and garlands, then move on to the finer details. I always love when couples display photographs of themselves that capture the essence of their personalities and that tell the story of their relationship, from an early date through to key milestones such as moving in together and getting engaged. Bearing in mind the lower light levels in your space (particularly in the evening), the best way to display your prints would be with the LED Photo Clips String Lights.
4. Invest in Flowers
Flowers will help to transform your village hall into the perfect wedding space. You’ll already have your hands full with the other aspects of decorating the venue, outlined above, so you might want to outsource this to a trusted local florist. Alternatively, if you want to tackle this task yourself and you’re able to find a local supplier, then you could fill vases, jugs and even teapots with an abundance of flowers. Either way, think about how the flowers will tie in with your overall colour scheme and be sure to avoid centrepieces that act as a barrier between guests making conversation over dinner!
5. Consider the Practicalities
Don’t just consider how the hall is going to look when it’s decorated; consider the practicalities too. Where will people leave their coats? Do you need space for wheelchairs and pushchairs? Where will you cut the wedding cake? Will there be a table where guests can leave gifts and sign your guest book? Also, please think carefully about where you will sit during the speeches. You want an attractive background behind you, and you want your photographer to have a clear view of you. You definitely don’t want a bland white wall or – worse still(!) – a fire extinguisher behind you in the wedding photos!
This is the ‘tip of the iceberg’! I have heaps more recommendations for you but, for now, I hope you’ll draw inspiration from the images and advice in this article. If you’re considering booking me as your wedding photographer, then please book a call with me using the link below and we can chat at length about how to decorate your village hall for your wedding!
Thanks for reading my five tips for decorating your village hall wedding. I don’t know about you but I feel like creating a Pinterest board!
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