Planning to Hire a Marquee for a Wedding Reception - Points to consider when planning your wedding marquees

Once you have accepted a proposal of marriage and decided on a marquee wedding reception in the garden at home or wedding venue, the first and probably single most important question is the date.

Summer and Autumn weddings usually offer sunshine filled photographs and flower filled gardens in light airy marquees, but considerations here are that intense summer heat may be your enemy on the day, and it is high season for most outdoor event suppliers so you are likely to pay premium prices across the board. Peak periods are extremely busy and you could be in the middle of a seasonal crush. You may also find that so many other outdoor events are going on, many of your guests may have other engagements with school events or holidays. Weddings in summer also have the potential benefit of more relaxed arrangements such as an outdoor BBQ, spit roasts, cold buffet and more informal garden party style of reception.

Spring is often considered a fresh and beautiful time of year and no-one can deny the wonderful feeling of warm spring sunshine after a dreary winter. However, you are at the mercy of nature and may well get a wet and blustery day with cold Easterly or wet Westerly winds. You may need think about the ground being muddy if there has been persistent rain through winter and early spring. The benefit can be that you get a much better deal overall, and all the hire equipment should be fresh from it's winter overhaul and generally event companies will not be quite so frantic.

Winter weddings, including Christmas and January weddings often have a special atmosphere to them. Whether this is due to Christmas being a family orientated time of year, or perhaps the dawning of a New Year after the Winter equinox in December - I'm not sure, but there is always a special cosy atmosphere. Of course you will need flooring, connecting walkways, full heating and all facilities enclosed in marquees, but generally the whole wedding marquee package tends to be favourable. Most often, winter weddings use dark velvet or starcloth linings which are ideal for creating intimate lighting schemes and picking out strong colours. Catering requirement at this time of year is for something hot and comforting, with heartwarming desserts and drinks.

The next consideration is an approximation of how many guests you expect to attend and the format of the wedding reception in terms of entertainment, catering and facilities.

Finding the correct size of marquee based on the specification.

Firstly, if you are on a tight budget, keeping the number of guests down is the simplest way to make the biggest savings on the marquees, furniture and catering costs. Freinds and associates can always be invited for evening drinks & buffet, when some of the close family will often be leaving, or indeed to a separate wedding party altogether.

By 'format' of the reception, I mean options such as: having a initial drinks reception area with a reveal curtain divide to hide the dining area or band platform, or simply mingling on the dance floor; a soft seating area away from the disco for guests to talk in comfort, or allowing use of the house lounge; a dedicated bar as a feature or simply large ice-filled bins with beers and wines on a help-yourself basis. Other popular ideas include portaloo with cloakroom, chill out areas, outside seating with parasols, band outmess or changing rooms if necessary and reveal curtain to hide starcloth over the dance floor. Much of these details will be connected to the date of the event and number of guests.

For large numbers of guests, and for those who like seperate reception marquees and perhaps seperate dance marquees the job of a good marquee coordinator is to make sure the marquee set-up doesn't dwarf the occasion. Too much marquee space and a wedding reception can start to lose it's personality. Likewise, in summertime too much tented area can spoil the enjoyment of the garden.

Lighting for the various areas of the marquee is important to varying degrees. In Winter, there is more scope for lighting effects whereas there will only be a limited effect to be had in mid-Summer. Lighting can make all the difference between the look of a fairly bland ivory lined wedding marquee with chandeliers hung down the middle, to an interesting yet subtle blend of light and dark patterns, colour washes and illuminated features.

There is a fine balance of sizes of marquees, type of marquee, number of satellite marquees, number of windows and doors suggested, lighting styles and a range of other considerations that your marquee company can advise on: the next part is slightly more specialised...

Designing the Interior of your Wedding Marquee

The interior design requirement generally falls into two distinct groups; those who want the interior styling to reflect the personality of the couple, or their common theme; those who would simply like a clean, smart interior in keeping with normal weddings.

For the latter, stick to simple ivory linings and perhaps a contrasting pastel valance [trim, pelmet - hides the join between the tops of the walls and the lining top]. Standard gilt chairs are fairly economical, but adding ivory seat pad covers to match ivory tablecloths is money well spent in terms of the look. A common mistake is ivory lining, gilt chair, gold seat, white tablecloths - the lack of coordination really stands out in photographs.

For the former, spend some time looking through portfolio pictures, wedding magazines and online catalogues and even discussing ideas at any of the popular wedding forums online. Talk through your ideas with your marquee contractor and you should be able to disregard impractical or overly expensive ideas and develop your better ideas into effective plans.

Every Wedding Reception has it's Hiccups...!

Even with all the best planning in the world, sometimes things can go wrong, but don't let it spoil your day if something does deviate from the plan.

Sometimes, things get over-planned. This is inherently bad, because the expectation becomes unrealistic, and you get so wrapped up the details of the flowers, or the marquee or the shade of pink ribbon the napkins are tied with and before you know it you're stressed and it feels like it's all going wrong. Don't be too precious about little things if they do go a little astray - it doesn't really matter.

Your Wedding Day is all about relaxing, enjoying and celebrating the happiest day of your life, and introducing the two families together at the wedding reception. Most importantly, remember: your guests are coming to celebrate the marriage of you and your fiancee - not to scrutinise the marquee or any other of your wedding day plans.

These are the key points taken into consideration when creating the ideal wedding marquee, but there is no exact science to it, so you need to be inspired with confidence that your marquee hire company, or more specifically your individual marquee coordinator has the experience and good judgement to get it just right on the day.