A Cornish Coastal Wedding

The first thing we did to start the ball rolling was to find our perfect venue. We found once we had the reception venue in our minds lots of styling ideas & the overall ‘look’ worked itself out.

We knew it had to be Cornwall & we knew the service had to be in the church in Mark’s home village Budock Water near Falmouth on the south coast. We drew a line in our minds around Falmouth of a about 20 miles & began to do our research. I’d like to be able to say we did lots of research, visited lots of venues and asked lots of pertinent questions but we didn’t. We googled Hotel Tresanton in St Mawes which we had heard only good things about and loved everything about their website. Of course, all weddings have a budget, was Tresanton going to be within ours? Via email with their wedding coordinator we discovered that it certainly could be so we made an appointment to meet with her at Tresanton next time we were in Cornwall.

Well, Tresanton was wonderful from the moment we arrived on an impossibly sunny March day in 2011. The hotel is beautiful; I am a Gallery Manager and Mark is a Photographer so artwork and having beautiful things around us is very important. The artwork and sculptures are stunning and are all handpicked by Olga Polizzi who owns the hotel. No bland furnishings and paint by numbers artwork here! I recall when we were shown around the hotel the suite we were lucky enough to snoop around had a Barbara Hepworth artist produced print and sculpture!
The room where the reception was to be held was lovely, light and airy and french windows out onto the terrace. Decorated very cleverly, we were shown some albums of previous weddings and couldn’t believe how different they all were. I’ve always wondered how some brides manage to look past the flock wallpaper and swirly carpets so often found in hotels. We knew straight away this was the place we dreamt of having our wedding reception.
The other thing was the staff in the venue, everyone we met was just fabulous. All along the way nothing was too much for them, Federica, Leila, Lucinda, Paul and every single other person that we met, spoke to or dealt with in any way were just exemplary. Something I learnt and tried to do along the way was to work with people who I felt a connection with, people who I felt ‘got’ the wedding that Mark and I wanted to achieve.
At no point did Mark & I regret choosing the first venue we saw, it was just perfect….all we had to work out was how to get 46 people from Budock Water and across the Fal!!

The Bar

View from the Bar

The Nook Terrace where we would be having our drinks reception

The beautiful mosiac floor in the cinema

Every bedroom has a sea view, see the Barbara Hepworth on the wall!

The reception area

Hotel Tresanton viewed from the water