Chic but Cheap Weddings

I’ve just read an interesting article in The Times with tips on producing a Chic but Cheap Wedding. I thought I’d share it with you for a bit of inspiration in these tough economic times:

Ahmed Boyer’s fiancée wanted it all and Boyer was getting desperate. His bride-to-be requested 500 guests and a brand new car for the short drive to the wedding service. She demanded a Chanel gown and a Caribbean honeymoon. Four bank robberies and a stolen £300,000 later, Boyer found himself not at the altar, but in court. “The wedding was costing a lot of money and I realised that I would never be able to pay for it,” the 36-year-old Austrian pleaded last month before being sentenced to prison. “The money from the first robbery went in a day so I just kept going.”

As this year’s wedding season approaches, many may be able to identify with Boyer’s plight. According to You & Your Wedding magazine, which has been calculating these things for more than a decade, for the first time in 2008 the average cost of a British wedding topped £20,000: the average dress cost £1,200, the average ring £2,090 and the average honeymoon a whopping £3,860.

Factor in the omnipresent credit crunch and the increasing number of couples – 53 per cent and growing – who now shoulder the brunt of the wedding costs without the help of parents, and you have a recipe for debt and disaster.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. “I’ve been so pleasantly surprised by what we can get for our money,” says Laura Burgess, who has a budget of £8,000 for her marriage to Andrew Greenman, 34, in June. A wedding on a budget, she has discovered, does not have to be a budget wedding, and can be pulled off without a plastic tiara, fake flower or dodgy DJ in sight.

Instead, 27-year-old Burgess has cut costs by keeping things local and personal. The ceremony will be held in an old town hall in Woodbridge, Suffolk, and the reception in an ancient tithe barn. Both venues are owned by the local council or parish, and neither relies on weddings as their main source of income. More importantly, neither comes with the attached suppliers that rack up the bills at private halls and hotels.

“We went to see a private barn run specifically for weddings, but it cost £5,000 in the high season – just for the barn,” says Burgess. “And then on top of that, you had to use the owner’s selected caterer. But we wanted to use suppliers who we had a connection with and who would give us a good deal.” The tithe barn costs £500 to rent and Laura’s Suffolk-inspired, seasonal menu works out at £26 a head, or just over £2,000 for 80 guests.

Emma Dunscombe, 34, enjoyed a similarly cheap yet chic wedding by keeping things local in Devon last autumn. She and her husband, Ben, had spent their childhood summers on the South Coast and their families owned cottages there in tiny villages on either side of an estuary outside Salcombe. “The cottage we chose is very small and very basic, but I didn’t need a fancy hotel,” she says. “It was such a happy day.”

As she and her bridesmaids prepared, the groom and his family sailed across the water on a boat lent to them without charge by the local sailing club. It was a short walk to the church and then on to the village hall next door – £190 for 109 guests, including tables and chairs. The whole wedding cost around half the UK average. “We decorated the tables with accessories from the local market and tea lights,” says Dunscombe. “It was all a bit hodge-podge but it looked enchanting and it was never about being extravagant. We just wanted a meaningful wedding and the village church and hall was so sentimental for both of us.”

Perhaps she was inspired by her younger brother and his wife who, a month earlier, had carried off a feat of budget ingenuity to give themselves the wedding of their dreams. “We were thinking about having our wedding in London,” Robin Moscoso, 31, says. But, as for many couples, a city wedding, with the inflated prices that comes with it would have been prohibitively expensive. “So we asked ourselves, ‘If we could go anywhere, where would our perfect wedding be?’ We love surfing and the sea, so decided that it would be in a room overlooking the ocean.”

Moscoso and his wife, Carmel, found a room in a beach hotel in the small north Devon town of Woolacombe where they had spent many happy holidays together. They invited 35 of their closest family and friends (“It was easy not to invite people,” says Robin, “because most didn’t want to trek down to Devon anyway,”) and paid for everything – a pub dinner on Friday, a “real breakfast” in a café on Saturday morning, an afternoon group surfing lesson and a three-course dinner at a local restaurant that evening – for just over £6,000.

“We’d been to so many friends’ weddings in big venues that come with their own caterers and florists, all at a premium ‘wedding price’,” he says. “But we found every element of our wedding ourselves and used different people and businesses for each. It took a lot of effort, but that’s how you save the pennies.”

Other couples have found that an effective route to cost-cutting is to go green. “Planning an ethical wedding can definitely save you money,” says Ria Lockie, the founder of The Ethical Occasions Company. “It involves using local resources, skills and talents, dumping all the unnecessary trimmings, and working closely – and doing deals – with local businesses.”

Not only do you get more bang for your buck this way, says Lockie, but you get exactly what you want on the day. The proof is in 35-year-old Lockie’s eco-wedding to her husband, David, last June: a bespoke three-day extravaganza for just over £10,000.

The ceremony took place in a field belonging to Pekes Manor, just outside Lewes, East Sussex. The guests sat on long, wooden benches, and Lockie’s bouquet overflowed with bright blue cornflowers and other wild hedgerow flowers gathered by a local, professional forager. “I didn’t even know such a thing existed,” admits Lockie. “But I knew what I wanted and I knew it had to be out there. The internet should be your best friend when planning a wedding.” She suggests that an even cheaper option for flowers, usually one of the most expensive aspects of a wedding, would be to approach a landowner directly, ask for permission to pick flowers, and then enlist the guidance of a local agricultural college student.

The reception was held in three open marquees hired from a carbon-neutral company at considerable cost. Although they used the tents for myriad parties and meals over the long weekend, Lockie was determined to make up for the indulgence, giving pots of herbs as wedding favours, creating place-names out of pebbles and a gold pen, and filling old wine bottles with home-made elderflower cordial for the tables. As the celebrations continued into the night, Lockie and her husband let off flying paper lanterns – biodegradable, of course – at a fraction of the cost of fireworks.

But the ultimate saving came on food. Apart from the main wedding lunch, the food over the three days was brought almost entirely by the guests in a series of bring-your-own barbecues and picnics. “We wanted our guests to feel like they were a part of the whole thing,” Lockie explains, “and we felt the best way to do that was to make people feel like they had a role in it.”

Alternatively, some have gone to the other extreme and cut most guests out altogether, travelling abroad with a selected few to places with guaranteed good weather, sandy beaches and none of the bloated prices that so mar the British wedding industry.

Andreas Palikiras, the marketing director of Ionian Weddings, a London-based Greek Islands specialist, says that the company has seen a 60 per cent increase in bookings over the past few months. “Many couples are coming to us because the cost of a UK wedding is spiralling out of control,” he says. He describes a wedding on Lefkada island in May that will cost only€1,600 (£1,452) for a beach ceremony, boat reception and 20 guests.

Jaine Fleetwood, 29, went even farther. She and her fiancé are living temporarily in Australia but decided that they could save money by marrying there rather than coming home. They have paid just A$400 (£182) for a ceremony in a corner of the Sydney Botanic Gardens and their guests, a few friends, no family, will be bringing their own picnics.

“It’s probably the cheapest wedding you’ll ever hear of,” says Jaine. “Cheap but still very chic.”

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