I am so excited to share with you today the truly spectacular wedding of Adam and Justin. This one of a kind wedding took place at one of London’s most prestigious hotels, The Corinthia Hotel in September and was the perfect venue for this beautiful couples musical inspired wedding.
Adam came to me right at the beginning of the year and explained his vision for a ‘Legally Wed’ themed wedding to reflect the recent law change in gay weddings (about time too!) and the couples love of musicals. So Adam opted for a bespoke design service to make his vision become a reality. I had great pleasure in designing a whole array of stationery from invites to on-the-day stationery based around the top West End musical Legally Blonde and a collection of other favourites.
Here is a collection of amazing photos capturing the day, taken by photographer Nick Ray showing the incredible attention to detail throughout the day. You can also see their beautiful wedding video filmed by Hang the Moon here.
Adam has also kindly shared a few words with us on the big day….
1. What was the overall look and feel you wanted to achieve for your wedding?
We’ve been together for 16 years and had been waiting for same sex marriages to be legal, so this day had been a very long time coming. So we wanted the day to be something very special. We therefore decided we wanted a humanist ceremony to celebrate our relationship and the commitment we were making.
We both love musicals, and one of our all-time favourites is Legally Blonde. We’ve seen it about 6 times. Putting the elements together we came up with the theme of “Legally Wed – a new musical”. Drawing on the original Legally Blonde musical poster for the inspiration for our invitations gave us dark blues and purples, splashes of pink, and sparkling lights. Our theme was born – the glitz and glamour of a West End musical premiere. From there, everything else fell into place – the rest of our stationery followed the same ‘Legally Wed’ theme, our tables were themed around different musicals, we both wore midnight blue tuxedos, and our flowers were purple with splashes of shocking pink.
2. Why did you opt for professional stationery over DIY?
We did try DIY, for about an hour. But neither of us are particularly visually creative. We had our vision but just couldn’t bring it to life in a professional way. So we knew we needed some help with our invites.
Once we’d seen the first proof for our invitations, we knew we’d made the right choice! We also knew we wanted all of our stationery to be just as professional, so we asked Lauren to do everything else for us too: our orders of service, the table plan, a big ‘welcome to the premiere’ poster to welcome people up the red carpet, the menu for our pre-ceremony gin reception, the poster for our photo booth…
3. What made you choose Heart Invites and were you pleased with the service and final products received?
We found Heart Invites via a combination of google and a recommendation, and we loved the samples of bespoke stationery on Lauren’s website. Having seen her previous work, we were confident Lauren could make our idea into a fantastic reality.
Lauren’s designs were absolutely fantastic – she completely got what we were trying to achieve and far exceeded our expectations with her speed of service and responsiveness. For each of our different items, Lauren did an initial proof that we were able to review and suggest a few tweaks to, before signing off on the final version. The printed output that was delivered was of such high quality – we were thoroughly impressed with the entire experience from start to finish. We couldn’t recommend Heart Invites highly enough.
Our stationery definitely helped create impact on the day and drew our theme together in a very professional way. And we were really pleased with how reasonable the cost was for the quality.
4. If you could give one piece of advice to any couples planning their wedding what would it be?
Looking back on the day, and desperately wanting to remember every scrap of it, one of our top tips would be to ensure you do everything you can to help you remember it!! Make sure you have space in the day to have a breather – just the two of you – and keep samples and photos of every little detail. We gave our guests an ‘I Spy with my little Camera Card’ on the tables with the challenge of taking every picture on their smart phones/cameras and sending them to us by email or sharing on social media. This helps to capture those little moments that your photographer may not be able to capture.
(Please note the Table Plan, I-Spy Card and Photo Booth photos are not the work of Nick Ray)