Nina & Joe

If you follow us on Instagram and Facebook you'll have seen a sneak peek of the immense donut wall and sweet table at this stunning outdoor wedding at Millbridge Court. If not, (Why not? Get following, you're missing out!), and you're seeing it for the first time get your pinning fingers ready because it's utterly fabulous! Also taking our breath away is Bride Nina's Grace Loves Lace bridal gown, with gorgeous long sleeves, sexy side spilt and puddle train. And complimenting the classic but super stylish gown is the heady mix of gold pineapple decor, botanical foliage and white blooms. Honestly everything is a knockout. RMW fave Nichola from Lemonade Pictures encapsulates the love and style of this wedding beautifully, with a set of images that'll you'll want to pore over again and again.

The Dress

Nina The Bride: I came across Grace Loves Lace on Instagram and the ‘Kate’ dress nearly two years before Joe proposed to me and I was taken by their entire collection of beautiful dresses and styles. I loved how differently they looked, elegant, chic, with a modern sexy twist and so different from traditional wedding dresses. I always knew I wanted to wear long sleeves and lace so when I started looking for my dream dress, I tried everything from Berta Bridal to Hayley Paige but nothing felt right. They all felt too bridal and formal and I really wanted to avoid feeling like I was going to prom. After a few failed dress trials I decided to contact Grace Loves Lace and order my dress from their website. To my surprise I found out they were coming to London so I quickly booked a concierge appointment with them and put my name down to try the Kate dress. At that point I was informed that they were discontinuing that particular dress and only had one (!) left in stock. I asked for them to bring it with them to London and I think I must have sent them more than one remainder email to ensure the dress wouldn’t be left behind. Eager as I was! As any bride to be, I was extremely nervous before my concierge appointment with GLL. My best friend and bridesmaid was flying in from Berlin to attend the appointment with me but she was unfortunately late due to the captain gone missing (not even joking!). So I went by myself and didn’t know what to expect, all I kept thinking was what I would do in case the dress didn’t fit me or wasn’t what I had expected it to be. When my appointment was due and I saw the beautiful dress hanging, waiting for me to try it on, I just knew this was it. I put the dress on and felt straight away how I had found my dream dress. I couldn’t believe how well it fitted me and how much better it was than I expected it to be. What was best was that I got to take my wedding dress with me straight away!! It is so true what they say; you know when you have found your dress! I got so many compliments for my dress and I am so happy that I managed to get hold of the last ever Kate dress! GLL makes the most stunning dresses and suits brides who are aren’t afraid of going against traditional wear. I styled it with the GLL Gabriella Veil and Hera anklets, to match the split at the front of the dress. In the evening I replaced the veil with a gold headpiece from H&M! As my legs and feet were on show, I wanted to avoid typical bridal heels and decided to go for a pair of Gianvito Rossi Portofino sandals in a beautiful gold shimmer colour to match the anklets and the dress.

Grooms Attire

As many grooms I am sure, Joe left his suit purchase to the very last minute. He knew what he was after and was certain he would find it. After trying on some suits in various stores in the city, he opted for a dark blue suit with a black satin collar from House of Fraser. He styled the suit with a white shirt, black bow tie, brown Bertie shoes and orange Ralph Lauren socks to match his mothers orange accessories.

The Venue

When planning our wedding, an important aspect for us was to incorporate our different cultures somehow and as with my dress, we wanted a venue that felt like us and not a typical wedding venue with heavy interior and colours. My sister in law Holly showed me Millbridge Court, she works around the area sometimes and knew we would like it. This was the second venue we saw and as soon as we entered, our search for the perfect venue ended! Millbridge Court truly gave us what we were after in a venue, modern, chic with minimalistic interior combined with the beautiful Surrey countryside. The beautiful interior represented my Swedish background incredibly well and the garden and location of the venue really represented Joe’s English background. It was just perfect for us and gave us the opportunity to style the venue how we’d like, as it is pretty much a blank canvas that allows for creativity! I particularly enjoyed this, as I love styling and interior! We really wanted an outdoor ceremony so the garden and arbour area at Millbridge Court was like a dream for us.

Colour Scheme/Décor

We really wanted the décor and colour scheme to represent our personalities and style. I am lucky to have a husband that appreciates interior and shares very similar taste to me so when we decided colour scheme, it was natural to keep it simple and in line with what we like personally as well. We went for white, green and gold with a botanical and asymmetrical style. Our flat is decorated in that style so it felt natural to go for colours we relate to and our friends and family relate to us! Our wedding stationery was white with a gold pineapple so we kept the pineapple theme going with 30 gold-sprayed pineapples decorated and styled through out the venue. Joe did a fantastic job with the pineapples. Joe also made our two quote boards himself. Each board was painted and the quote written on by him and I truly loved how it turned out. We went for one of our all time favourite quotes in the ceremony area and the other board as a warm welcome for our guests as they entered the venue accompanied by a big gold balloon! For our seating arrangements, Joe sprayed a hulahoop gold and attached white ribbon to it and on the ribbons he glued each table plan. For nametags we used bay leaves from Joes parents garden and handwrote each guest name with a gold pen, which worked really well with our botanical theme. Our wedding favours were a favourite of mine. We had two favours, yummy alcoholic lollies from Holly’s Lollies with our own personalised stickers and bubbles (not the fizzy kind) for our guests to have fun with! Who doesn’t like to blow bubbles and alcoholic lollies? They went down like a treat. Joe has a massive sweet tooth and we really wanted a sweet station in the evening. However, we took our own little twist on this and went for a donut wall and pic and mix candy from Sweden that my parents brought with them. I think we had nearly 10 kilos worth of candy! For the pic and mix and our donut wall, I had customized white bags with the same design as the rest of our wedding stationery and added ‘’all you need is love…and maybe a donut’’. We also had a Fujifilm Instax Mini camera by our guestbook for people to sign and take a pic of themselves. However, we did forget to put batteries in the camera which we realised later on when majority of our messages in the guestbook stated that they couldn’t use the camera due to no batteries. Something obviously had to go wrong ha ha. Our Hashtag for the wedding was #OnCloudBeard, so we had that written on a lightbox as a little reminder for our guests.

Flowers/Florist

Our lovely florist and stylist was Hannah at Hannah Berry Flowers. I contacted Hannah and we clicked straight away. She knew exactly what we were after, her enthusiasm and passion made the whole experience better than we could have imagined. We loved working with her and trusted her 100% with the flowers and styling. It is such a blessing to work with people who understands your vision and gets nearly as excited as you get, that is exactly how she works and I’d work with her again and again if I could! It was very important for us to have the flowers styled and represent our botanical and asymmetrical theme. Everything from the table arrangements to the arbour was asymmetrical and different to one another. We had low, botanical and wild table arrangements in clear vases. The shelves in the wedding breakfast room were styled with the gold pineapples and botanical leafs. Each shelf was styled differently to stick with the asymmetrical theme. We also had different botanical foliage in clear vases and bottles styled on all the different tables around the venue. The ceremony area was incredible! Hannah styled the arbour in green botanical foliage with big white flowers starting from one side all the way to the middle of the arbour. We had white rose petals scattered all over the isle. What Hannah did to the arbour blew us away! We were so pleased with the outcome and how she managed to style it exactly like we had imagined it. It looked amazing! For my 30th birthday, Joe got me three huge white balloons, as I LOVE them. My amazing friends got me them for my hen as well and I also had to have them for our wedding. We styled five of them just by the ceremony area, two on one side and three on the other side in white and gold with ribbons in light green and white. Hannah also created some flower garlands that went on top of the two quote boards, our hula hoop with the seating arrangement and the bridesmaids bouquets were later styled on top of our donut wall! Springtime is our favourite time of the year and it is also the time for my absolute favourite flower, which is the peony. For my bridal bouquet I had a hard time deciding whether to go for a all white peony bouquet or a big wild, foliage heavy bouquet. I went for the first option, which I am so happy about! My bouquet looked absolutely amazing and the peonies made me so happy. I had 100% silk ribbons from VVrouleaux attached to it. My bridesmaids and flower girl had small botanical bouquets with big white flowers and silk ribbons. Our mothers had a small and simple botanical corsage and the groom and groomsmen had small botanical buttonholes with feathers.

Wedding Party Fashion

All my bridesmaids are so different which I absolutely loved. I really wanted them to feel like themselves and be beautiful so it was important to me to make sure we went for a dress and look that they all loved. At first we were thinking of mixing two different colours but then my lovely friend Lulu and bridesmaid, found these gorgeous navy blue dresses with lace inserts from ASOS's own line. I loved the simplicity of it and the colour just felt right. The girls styled the dresses with simple gold accessories and bohemian hairstyles with individual flowers in their hair. Our flower girl Poppy wore a navy blue dress with sequins from Monsoon. I surprised my bridesmaids with peach coloured robes that said ‘Brides Squad’ on the back and individual make up bags with their names on, filled with little presents such as a mini Bottega Venetta prosecco bottle, make up wipes, chocolate, a handwritten letter, candle with the first letter of their name on, deodorant, painkillers and an individual necklace with their name and birthstone on. The best man was Joe’s son Donovan. He was wearing a navy blue three-piece suit from Marks and Spencer with brown shoes from River Island to match his fathers Berties as well as orange Ralp Lauren socks. He charmed everyone!

Hair and Makeup

I have always loved playing around with hair and make up so it felt natural to do it myself for the wedding. I tried some different styles and spent a small fortune on new make up (as you do..), in the process I learnt so much about different products and techniques. I loved the whole experience and will remember it forever! The girls got to choose their own hair and make up as I wanted them to feel like themselves. My sister’s good friend who is a professional hair and make up artist was on site to help with the girls. She did a fantastic job!

Ceremony

On our wedding day, we woke up to heavy clouds and I am not going to lie, I was worried about how we would manage to do an outdoor ceremony. As the day went on and we approached the ceremony start, the sun came out and all of a sudden, all the clouds were gone! It was incredible. Our amazingly talented harpist Ruth Cartledge played some of our favourite songs as our guests got seated. When it was time for me to walk down the aisle with my father, she played Ludovio Euinadi – Fairytale and for our walk as husband and wife she played Beyonce – Halo. We wanted to keep the ceremony simple and tailored to us as much as possible. My sister Hanna and Joes mother did a reading each, my sister read a poem by Rumi and Joes mother a poem called ‘True Love’. The ceremony was perfect for us. Not too long and not too short. The weather and the atmosphere was beautiful and we will always remember it with so much love. We still can’t get over our incredible luck with the weather and for the rest of the day we had the most beautiful summer weather in the first week of May when rain was forecasted!

Entertainment/Music

Not only am I Swedish, but I also have a Persian background and we wanted to combine this to the overall Swedish/English mix! One part of a Persian wedding tradition is for a bridesmaid or the sister of the bride to dance with the cake knife before the bride and groom can cut the cake. While she dances with the knife, the groom is supposed to give her gold and money. We thought this would be a fun idea but took our own take on it. My sister and good friend Kimberly did the knife dance together and had everyone laughing and clapping. The bride isn’t supposed to get involved but I of course did ha. For music we went for one of my old work colleague who is a drummer and plays in a band called Real Event. Me and him and joked about him playing at my wedding so we had to make that joke into reality! The band was incredible and had everyone dancing; they played everything from The Killers to old Motown classics! Our first dance was to Sade – By your side, a song that means a lot to us and which we share many memories to.

Food

Kalm Kitchen was our caterer and they are an amazing caterer that adds a touch of creativity to every dish! We were so incredibly pleased with our food and many of our guests have said it was the best wedding food they have had. For canapés we offered a variety of dishes, such as mini beef wellington to pulled pork sliders. For starters, we kept it simple with an antipasti platter, followed by a scrumptious chicken dish and alternating desserts: Eton mess and chocolate brownie! Our mothers and Joe made our wedding cake. We are so fortunate with amazing bakers in our family, so it was an easy choice to have our mothers bake it. Our mothers baked the layers and Joe put it all together and styled it with individual flowers provided by Hannah. Joe used to be a chef so he is incredibly talented in the kitchen. Our cute cake topper was from notonthehighstreet.com.

Photographer

Our amazingly talented photographer was Nichola, Lemonade Pictures. I had been following her work on Instagram for ages and when we were looking to book a photographer, one of my good friends recommended Nichola to me again and the search ended there. She was perfect; she knew exactly what we were after, so professional and talented. She also helped me with my dress before it all started and it just felt like having a friend around all day taking great photos of you! Joe does not enjoy having his photo taken and every single photo of him is perfect, I may be biased but it is true. We wanted to avoid the overly posed wedding photos and focus on having fun, in the moment photos of both our guests and us. Nichola managed to capture the atmosphere of our wedding incredibly well and I wish I could work with her again!

Tips

You spend so much time planning One day and if you get too caught up in it all, you will look back wishing you had enjoyed the day more! It is so true that the day goes by so quickly. Enjoy the day and allow everything to flow naturally. Don’t stress about the little things because it is not about the little things, it is about the love between you and your partner and everything else will work itself out. Which it sure did for us, even though we forgot to put batteries in our little guestbook camera! We got a wedding more magical than anything we could have dreamt of and that is such a perfect start to our marriage! Ladies, don’t put too much pressure on yourselves! You are beautiful and perfect just the way you are. It is okay to be yourself on your wedding day. Make choices that are good for you and make you happy! The day is about you and the love of your life. Enjoy it all!

Our wedding

If I could describe our wedding in one word it would be Love! Love was everywhere and that was all we wanted. During our wedding breakfast, my father held a beautiful speech to me and Joe. His speech was in Swedish but had it translated to English and had it up on a projector so our guests could understand. Joe’s speech to me made everyone laugh and it was straight from his heart, which I loved! The speeches didn’t end there. I also held a speech and Joes beautiful daughter Emily, who was one of my bridesmaids, finished it off with the most beautiful speech that had our friends and family in tears. We wanted to keep our wedding breakfast as interactive as possible and before the evening started, we had our good friend Jason doing a Kahoot quiz for our guests. The quiz had everyone laughing and it was the best way to set the tone for the rest of the evening.