The latest wedding venue trends

Picking the reception venue for your wedding is the first thing to cross off the to-do list for your wedding. You need to be quick with the venue selection, especially if you want to get married in peak wedding season, as the most popular ones get booked up early. If this is worrying you a little because you have no idea what kind of venue you’re looking for, fear not. We’re here to help you find what venue suits your style. Here are some of the latest wedding venue trends to help you find your way.

Venue trend 1: DIY venues

For a lot of couples, the convenience of a wedding package is too hard to pass up. Wedding packages have provided an easy option in the past years, and have given couples more opportunity to relax and allow the venue to take care of all the details.

While a wedding package is still extremely popular, quite a few couples are now looking for a DIY option. This is where you find a venue where you can simply pay the hire costs and organise their own catering, decorations, flowers, cake, and entertainment.

DIY wedding venues are a great option for couples who are really creative and want to see the vision of their wedding come to life. It’s also great for the bank balance. DIY weddings are so much cheaper than booking an inclusive package at a hotel or country house.

As more and more couples become more focused of their wedding budget, DIY is becoming a common motif of modern weddings.

Venue trend 2: Smaller reception venues

As budgets become more prominent in young couples’ minds, the wedding venues of their choosing are becoming smaller and smaller. This is making smaller wedding venues in vogue at the moment.

Because the venues are smaller, so are the guest lists. We’re now seeing many couples marrying with fewer than one hundred guests in attendance. This is now becoming much more normal compared to the larger than life upscale receptions that we have all attended at some point over the past 10 years.

Small wedding venues like vineyards, golf clubs, restaurants, and boutique hotels are perfect for these smaller receptions, as you can have exclusive use of the venue without spending a fortune. Any married couple will tell you that the special day passes in a haze, and often their big regret is the lack of time they had with each individual guest. Opting for a smaller, more intimate reception is one way to guarantee that you do have the chance to mingle with all your friends and family.

Venue trend 3: Destination wedding venues

Wedding celebrations were typically held in the bride’s home town. This is not really too common these days as most people leave their hometowns and move to far off places. You’ll find that more of your friends and family have become more scattered and because of this, electing to hold your wedding in a location that you love might be preferential.

No matter how far from home it might be, marrying somewhere that you both love will feel blissful. Over the past few years we’ve seen a constant increase in the amount of destination weddings. Whether you pick a posh reception for one hundred in the French countryside, or an intimate reception for ten on a Thai island, destination wedding venues are a fashionable alternative to traditional ones. And you totally get a holiday out of the experience too, which is delightful.

Venue trend 4: Rustic wedding venues

Rustic weddings are currently all the rage. And we can see why. A rustic wedding is defined as having a lot of nature-inspired elements. Rustic weddings have an earthiness, a connection and a spirit to them that make them unique. For your rustic wedding, you can opt to hold your reception in a beautiful barn on a farm or you could choose to have it in a beautiful vineyard where you either sit indoors or out and look over the grape vines.

Rustic weddings are heavily related to boho and vintage weddings and they often get intertwined. A vintage or boho wedding will likely have many rustic elements like lots of connection to plants and nature, but they’ll have their own spin on it too. For example, a rustic wedding will likely involve wooden tables and minimal table coverings. Whereas a vintage or boho wedding would likely have lace and doilies on tables, reminiscent of your grandmother’s living room.

Venue trend 5: All in one receptions

Wedding days that feature different venues for the ceremony, the wedding breakfast, and the evening reception are decreasing in popularity as couples look for the convenience of a venue that can cater for every part of their wedding day. This is aimed at couples who are busy and short on time.

For some couples planning every moment of the day is not what they had in mind and so a venue that can cater for all aspects of the wedding is incredibly easy to pull off. Civil ceremonies are now far more popular than religious weddings and this makes it simpler to use single locations for combined ceremonies and receptions.

Venue trend 6: Outdoor wedding venues

For a number of years, outdoor wedding venues have been a very popular choice for British couples. When the weather is nice, we Brits love to be outside and bask in the sunshine. So of course we want our weddings to be this way too.

Whether you opt to hold your reception in your own garden, in a local farmer’s field, in a country park, or at the beach; natural outdoor venues are big news. Festival chic plays a big role in outdoor weddings this year, with couples organising campsites for more adventurous guests, hiring multiple live bands, and serving wedding food from catering vans.

Wedding styles for outdoor events are often a bit more casual, with relaxed flowers arrangements, unstructured bridal dresses, and a simple marquee to ward off the rain.

Venue trend 7: Traditional wedding venues

In the UK, we’ll probably never lose touch with our tradition-loving roots. This means that traditional weddings are likely always going to be popular. A traditional wedding involves all the elements that you could think a wedding would have: cake cutting, garter toss, first dance etc. and it also happens to be in a quintessentially traditional English venue. These types of venues are places like country estates and manor houses which are always the first kinds of wedding venues to get booked out in Britain.

If traditional is your thing, then make sure you book the beautiful wedding venue that Jane Austen would adore early. You’ll discover that these kinds of venues are very popular.

Venue trend 8: First date wedding venues

An adorable trend that has been cropping up quite a bit lately is the first-date wedding. This kind of wedding is exactly what it sounds like: you two tying the knot in the place where you had your first date. If this doesn’t scream romance, then we don’t know what does! The rules for this trend are pretty relaxed. You can marry in the exact restaurant or café where you had your date or you could marry in the town in which the date took place.

These kinds of weddings are incredibly romantic and sentimental. It’ll really bring up some intense emotions between the two of you on the day as you are able to both reminisce on the past and look to your gloriously happy future together.

Venue trend 8: Experience wedding venues

A fabulously fun trend at the moment is the ‘experience’ wedding venue trend. This might sound kind of strange but don’t write it off just yet. Experience wedding venues are where you do an activity on the day of the wedding and it becomes a part of the wedding. Say you’re marrying in a vineyard, on the day of your wedding you might have the vineyard owner to take you and your guests on a wine tour.

Or say you’re both adrenaline junkies, you could consider booking a venue where you can do a crazy activity like go zip-lining. Anything where you’re doing a planned activity can be considered an experience wedding venue. If you opt for this style of wedding, you won’t just be getting married, you’ll also be making some amazing memories.

Venue trend 9: Surprise wedding venue

People love to do the unexpected. They like to stir the pot and keep things interesting. This is why surprise weddings are creeping up in popularity and potentially getting more popular than eloping. Though it is similar to eloping. It has the surprise element but you still have everyone you love most in attendance. The surprise wedding venue is just that, a surprise. They can literally be anywhere you like, but if you want to keep things subtle, then you might want to pick somewhere low-key like a park, a restaurant or your own backyard.

The problem with surprise weddings is that there is a risk that not all of your guests will be able to make it if they don’t know it’s a wedding they’ll be attending. If you love the element of surprise, then this has got to be the style of wedding you go for.