A Luxury Syon Park Wedding

Kateryna is wor­thy of any grand por­trait her­self, and she and Prakash make a hand­some cou­ple. Either of these two would stop traf­fic wear­ing jeans! — but in their wed­ding day fin­ery they both look amazing.

They’ve writ­ten a lovely wed­ding report for the blog, which I believe is very much down to Prakash (I love wed­ding sto­ries from grooms!) so I’ll hand over the sto­ry­telling reins now, and show you beau­ti­ful pho­tographs of the wed­ding cour­tesy of Natasha Thomp­son to com­plete the fea­ture for today.

It’s not really my style to talk too much about my out­fit! Katya wanted me to choose a tie that was ivory white in color so it would match what she was going to wear. I think it was really nice to do this. We found such a tie at Pal Zileri.

Kateryna’s wed­ding dress was by Alan Han­nah – found while attend­ing a Lon­don Bridal Expo (Feb­ru­ary 2011), and pur­chased from Ellie Sander­son Bridal Bou­tique.

Our guests started gath­er­ing at the Great Hall from about 2pm and it was great to see all the new and old faces from var­i­ous episodes in our lives.

Half of our guests had trav­elled from over­seas (from Rus­sia, Ukraine, Ger­many, USA, South Africa and Aus­tralia) which made for a wide cul­tural mix.

The cer­e­mony started at 3.40pm. Katya looked absolutely beau­ti­ful walk­ing down the aisle with her veil on and her father beside her.

They walked slowly and I could see how proud and happy her father was. Katya’s brides­maid Olesya fol­lowed closely look­ing after the tail of Katya’s dress.

Dur­ing the cer­e­mony Olesya made a read­ing and we had Gina per­form a song with her harp.

Our reg­is­trar kept a seri­ous, almost sacred tone through­out her offi­ci­at­ing. She took us through our vows slowly and then we were married!

The sign­ing took place in an amaz­ing adjoin­ing room. This was just with our fam­ily and wit­nesses whilst sign­ing our mar­riage cer­tifi­cate. Then Katya and I were led back through the aisle and then to a pri­vate area whilst our guests were taken through the hall­ways of the house and into the courtyard.

The del­i­cate arm­band was made at Katya’s request by Ellie Sander­son. Her shoes are by Rus­sell & Brom­ley.

The room we were taken to was one of those ornate rooms you see when you’re on a palace tour that are so glo­ri­ous from behind the ropes that you are left to only imag­ine life inside. This time there were no ropes and we got to con­firm what I had thought all along – the couches they made back then were quite comfy!

Here we got to spend 5–10 mins together alone to reflect on what we had just done. From there we were taken through the house for some pho­tos and then announced to our guests in the courtyard.

Now isn’t that a lovely, lovely cud­dle?! I could almost join Prakash and Kateryna for a bit of a group hug!

With­out mean­ing to cut Prakash off in his prime, I’m going to pause so we can all reflect on how sump­tu­ous Syon Park is, and how exquis­itely ele­gant the wed­ding pho­tos we’ve just seen. There’s more from Katya and Prakash on Eng­lish Wed­ding blog tomor­row though, so pop back at 11am to see:

• more gor­geous wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy by Natasha Thompson
• Russ­ian wed­ding traditions
• a wed­ding magi­cian at work
• the aston­ish­ing glass dome of Syon House from the inside
• the bride and groom blind­folded, try­ing to recog­nise their other halves by touch alone. Which one gets it wrong?! …

See you tomor­row, have a won­der­ful day.

Claire xxx