Read about Candice and Carl’s wedding planning journey in the first of this 3 part series – written in their own words.
We knew we wanted something different for our wedding, we had always loved France; the food, the wine, its beauty, warmth and memories of holidays on the South coast. The idea of making our special day somewhere we would always remember, a unique day just for us, to share with our family and friends, a perfect day….
Our first thought was that we could get married in a French church and find a venue for the reception, but unfortunately you have to have lived in France for over a month to do that and as much as we would have loved to stay in the beautiful sunny countryside of France, it wasn’t possible. We decided to have a blessing and our reception in France instead. We searched online for venues and found a number of agencies that could help us to find our dream location. Our initial thought was to use a venue finding service to get the ball rolling and then we would organise the rest ourselves. How hard could it be?
We chose to use the French Wedding Company for this as they had a range of venues to suit our budget and hand-picked 12 options for us to narrow our search. We chose to view six and spent an amazing weekend touring the Dordogne countryside and looking at venues. We were met at each one by Laura and her team to walk the venues and give us suggestions about what we could do at each one, which helped us to visualise what our day would look like and the general flow of the day.
Our chosen venue was the first place we visited, although it was a hard choice between the options available. The sun shone on the hilltop Chapel of St Pauls next to the tastefully renovated stonework gites. The idea that we could have our ceremony in a chapel and have our reception within the gardens overlooking the fields and lake, with accommodation for our closest friends and family was more than we hoped for. St Pauls was beautiful and we had found our venue.
It takes us just 7-10 days to turn around a wedding venue search. For Candice and Carl we sourced approx 30 possible venues, contacted 20 who met their exact requirements, proposed 12 that were the nearest match, available and within budget. Contact us to get your venue search under way.
