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“Awesome venue for a wedding”

written by SarahRath on 21/08/2012

I am so pleased that we chose to get married at Orchardleigh, as we realloy did have the day of our dreams. I did a lot of wedding venue research and had a tick list of features I wanted for our wedding day and Orchardleigh was the venue that met them!

We really wanted to get married in a church and I fell in love at first sight with St mary's Church (the island church) on our initial visit. Unfortunately with a wedding of 140 people using this church wasn't possible and instead we used All Saints Lullington, which is so beatutiful inside and had all of our guests take a vintage bus (Quantock Motor Services were brilliant) from the house to the church and back again.

The elegance of Orchardleigh gives all the wow of a stately home wedding but as it is filled with replica's and not filled with original priceless pieces of art and furniture we did not have to worry about anything getting damaged in the course of having a good party, which was a concern at some of the other venues we looked at.

The major selling point of Orchardleigh was that we could have all of our guests (our wedding was for 140) stay with us for the night and join us for breakfast the following day and 130 of them did. As this is all done through the bride and groom and not your guests dealing with orchardleigh directly, it is hard work and if you go beyond the capacity of the house and have to use the cottages as we did, the fact that the cottages have a later arrival time complicates things a great deal. You also have to pay for 50% of the cottages at the time you book which is scary because at that stage we were not entirely sure of who was staying. However despite this being my largest point of stress in the run up to the day, it was worth it! Our freinds have all commented how nice it was to be able to pop to their room and change shoes or outfits! But being able to say goodbye the following morning means you can have a proper party on the night of your wedding and not have to turn off the music and have everyone leave at 11.30 - 12pm like most venues.

The food was excellent, we opted from Menu 2 with the Thai Fishcakes and the Roast Pork which were both delicious. The chef is lovely and we really enjoyed the food tasting.

The orchardleigh team are also great, we visited the venue on several occasions beforehand, had numerous phone calls and emails and it all worked out well on the day. Karl ran our day for us and he was brilliant, really keeping everything under control when everyone turned up (although i would recommend a team of ushers to help with this), but making sure that the bride and groom got drinks and canapes too!

Of course there are small things that could have been changed or could be run more smoothly for example the fact that you cannot dress the ballroom for your wedding until 11.30am if there has been a wedding in it the night before, or the fact that in hindsight I wouldn't have put my grandparents in the downstairs room with disabled facilities because it is noisy if you party as late as we did then the cleaning starts, but I dont think any of these detracted anything about our day, With more time I could have dressed the ballroom myself but I don't think it would have looked any better! The venue is great, you will have a wedding day that you will never forget and just be organised, have a good team of people to help you and go with the flow because it really will all work out fabulously!