Dining tables in a marquee

Hiring a marquee makes planning your garden wedding simple

Planning a wedding can be very hectic and time consuming as you juggle organising your big day alongside the demands of everyday life. A huge aspect of this planning is selecting and styling the right venue from the many choices available. So the ability to find help with this is crucial to being able to make it through the wedding planning stage stress-free.

One such option is to hire a marquee for your wedding reception. Contrary to popular belief, choosing a bespoke marquee can be less work than the alternative bricks and mortar venue. Not only does it offer you freedom on where you choose to have your wedding (a large back garden, the ground of an historic venue or in a field with views of the coast), you can also hand over the organising and planning of your event to seasoned professional such as Marquees and Pavilions.

By handing over the reigns of organising your venue to the experts, you can free up your time for the more exciting tasks of deciding where to honeymoon and what you’re going to wear. Having organised a wealth of weddings before you, they can help guide you through the day and take care of everything from designing the ideal venue, to making sure it’s equipped with everything you need for your special day.

If you’re thinking of hiring a marquee for a garden wedding, here’s our guide what you need to consider.

1. Site Visit & Planning

Before booking your marquee you should first organise a site visit. This is crucial in helping to establish:

  • The size of the venue so we can provide the right size marquee to fit the space available.
  • Type of garden.  Is it grass lawn or patio/hardstanding?  Does it slope or have any large trees or shrubs or garden features.  For example, fountains and statues could be enhanced by lighting or even included within the marquee as a feature!
  • Access to and from the garden so we can establish how best to transport/carry the marquee equipment onto the site.
  • If there is a power supply available from the main house or whether we will need to use a generator.
  • Your bespoke requirements such as style of the marquee, what type of lighting is preferred, catering area required, loos required etc.
  • Available budgets so that the size and style of the marquee can be tailored to fit the budget available.

There is no extra cost for the site visit.

2. Design

Once the above has been confirmed we will go away and come back to you with whole list of questions to finalise the design. This is where you start making decisions on how you want your perfect wedding venue to look and feel.

First we will let you know the potential size of the marquee available for your garden, which in turn gives us the maximum number of guests that your marquee can cater for. By using modular marquees – our marquees are built in 3m section – this gives you plenty of options for increasing and decreasing the marquee in size and design to ensure all your guests fit in comfortably.

Then we ask you to choose your flooring from the selection of matting, wooden floor with carpet or cassette flooring. Depending on the ground of the site we may have to suggest the best flooring option. If the ground is soggy or uneven, we would suggest the wooden flooring and carpet option to keep the marquee floor level. If the ground has a particularly steep gradient a cassette floor would be necessary.

Once these details have been finalised we get on with designing the bespoke drawing of your marquee and garden. The drawing is to scale which will help you when it comes to planning the finishing touches. We will be sure to include plenty of windows if your site has spectacular views or incorporate outside lighting to highlight particular garden feature or areas of the grounds.

Following the site visit and the initial drawing we provide you with a detailed quote with no hidden costs, that also includes any delivery charges.

Once the initial drawing has been finalised the fun begins! You are now in charge of choosing the perfect lining, lighting and dance floor to fit with your theme. We have multiple options to make your marquee unique to you and are happy to provide you with lots of ideas. No two of our marquees have ever been the same!

3. Installation

Once you have agreed the plan and made the booking, you can leave the rest to us!

Depending on the size of a marquee it can take from 1 – 3 days to build & approximately 1-2 days to take down. We inform and discuss install and de-rig dates directly with the clients to ensure it works for everyone.

Should you wish to find out more about hiring a marquee for a garden wedding please feel free to call Marquees and Pavilions to speak to one of our experts. We’re more than happy to provide you with guidance and ideas based on our many years of experience, or to arrange a site visit so that we may prepare you a quote. You can call us directly on 01844 208 371 or get in touch via our contact form.

In the meantime, we leave you with a few final tips on how to get the most from your marquee:

  • Planning – the initial planning is the key, if you have thought through the process thoroughly from the start then the rest of the plans “should” run together smoothly.
  • Budget – we appreciate that some potential clients do not wish to discuss this particular point but it can be very helpful for ourselves to ensure that our quote is within budget and realistically achievable.
  • Communication – don’t be afraid to call us if you have any questions, we have a wealth of experience and establishing any issues and resolving them quickly is the best way forward. We will always have productive and constructive answers to help towards resolving any issues.
  • Power Requirements – it is helpful to know how much power everyone will be using in the marquee, for example, the caterers, band/DJ, photo booths and chocolate fountains etc. Last thing you want is someone plugging in an appliance and it overloads the system!