An enchanted forest wedding at Ottimo House Sydney, filled with lush, magical flowers, candles and fabric flourishes. Wedding photography by Hello Sweetheart and behind the scenes photos by Captured Frames.
When Chantelle first approached us to chat about her wedding, we chatted about initial concepts, scratched some things on paper… that’s typical for most of our initial consultations. After around 8 months of planning and working together, we ultimately designed and created one of our most unique and favourite wedding experiences to date: an Enchanted Forest themed affair at Ottimo House in Sydney!
We wanted to take you through what this all looks like, as we get asked this a lot! The first step to any wedding with substantial decorative scope is to make sure we’ve got what is in our client’s head onto paper (or PDF these days). This process may take a few rounds to nail, but ultimately it will result in a one page visual mood board. The goal behind this mood board is to encapsulate the overall theme, style, look and feel of the wedding or event, as this is what we eventually use throughout the planning process to guide us on what to recommend and style with.
As part of our end-to-end full wedding design, planning and styling service, we always start with the creation of this mood board. This was Chantelle & Josh’s mood board: an enchanted forest theme, filled with dark richness, warmth and lushness, with a touch of sparkle.
Once this theme was confirmed, we created the colour and floral palettes. This is consistent with the above overall mood board theme, but simply draws out these details further in order to add depth and understanding for the client.
Chantelle & Josh’s colour palette consisted primarily of oxblood red, gold and forest green tones, alongside lighter secondary colours to contrast and shade. Colour theory and shading is so important but more on that in another future post :)
Their floral palette featured roses, dahlias, carnations, ferns, magnolia leaves and drapey elements such as hanging amaranthus, oncidium orchids and peppercorn foliage. We also mention to clients that whilst one can never 100% guarantee the flowers on the day due to the forces of Mother Nature, this floral palette exercise is important as it’s a high level representation of the style and feel of the flowers that we’ll select.
The next step is to break up the wedding scope into sections to create individualised design proposals for each component. Below are examples of what we proposed for the bridal table stage area, and one of the guest design concepts. The bridal table area was the most important element and our couple wanted it to be the star of the show, so we focussed a lot on that.
Through the use of inspiration images and rough sketches, we try to evoke the general concept for each design element. Since every wedding of ours is completely bespoke, it’s often difficult to provide an image that absolutely depicts what something will look like (since it hasn’t been created yet), so the combination of images helps us represent this as best we can.
