James & Tom's Wedding at Cooling Castle Barn
We are a family run business providing affordable, high quality venue dressing. We are completely flexible and can provide as little or as much as you desire.
This is your big day and everything must be perfect!
We offer a personal and bespoke service tailored to your wedding theme and design. If desired we hold free consultations to ensure the service and products are exactly what you require.
No hidden costs – the prices you see are the prices you get!!
With a variety of offerings to choose from, we’re sure you’ll be happy working with us. Look around our website and if you have any comments or questions, please feel free to contact us.
G Wedding Directory would like to thank James & Tom for allowing us to publish their story.
Many thanks,
Andrew & John.
After Tom and I had got engaged in Switzerland we were very excited to get home and start looking for our perfect wedding venue! It turned out, after hours of internet searches, one on the laptop, the other on an iPad, that there was only one place for us!
We were both sure we wanted to have a more relaxed feel to our wedding and that a rustic style wedding was the one for us. We found the gem that is Cooling Castle Barn near Rochester after an exhaustive internet search. From their webpage we could see that that had everything that we wanted - barns, some outdoor space, clean and modern accommodation and as a bonus some castle ruins! We loved the fact it was out of the way, enjoying the drive through winding country lanes each time we had to visit.
Cooling Castle Barn is a very busy venue, booked a full year ahead for any dates that we wanted! But didn’t feel like that at all on one special day. In fact, for that day we really did feel like royalty! The staff were so accommodating of all our wishes, they were welcoming for the different providers we had hired also.
By the time the last couple of week came around we were both feeling pretty relaxed…about the organisation at least! We had been lucky to find the perfect people to help us plan and capture our day.
After the decision to go rustic and finding Cooling, we set about searching for the perfect, simple look for the day. Again, serendipity worked in our favour and we both fell in love with suits from the same tailor…even when searching at different times. Jack Bunney’s (www.jackbunneys.co.uk) is a family business based in Barking. They offer the most beautiful cloths and full customisation of suits. Tom and I both chose to use the same pattern, but different colour tweeds. This meant we could be individual on the day, but compliment each other fully. We opted for other little touches to be more personal, I had a bow tie to match the suit, Tom wore a beautiful blue tie to match our dads and brothers, who wore matching suits, with colours to reflect Tom and my suits.
The tables and main hall were decorated by Charlotte from Sashes and Centrepieces (www.sashesandcentrepieces.co.uk). We absolutely loved working with Charlotte. She was so excited and enthusiastic about our ideas and gave many suggestions on how to bring out ideas to life. She brought our centrepieces to life and also made stunning bouquets for our ‘groomsmaids’.
Cooling has the option of entering the service by walking down stairs into the barn..which we opted for…the grooms maids weren’t so keen! It was amazing as we made our decent to the aisle as a round of applause rose up filling the barn. Although very nervous this made us feel more confident in taking those steps together; along with a wonderful backing track Tom and I had chosen. The service was punctuated with three readings by close friends and some classical pieces played during the signing of the register. We walked out to ‘The Story’ sung by Sara Ramirez, which gets quite rocky! That definitely ended the service on an unexpected note!
The rest of the day was spent having amazing photos taken, by Five Owls Photography (www.fiveowls.co.uk), and mixing with our family and friends. Cooling Castle Barn provided an amazing wedding breakfast, which we had pre-chosen, however they were willing to have menus for the day! The brownie for pudding was a popular choice with everyone! Our Master of Ceremonies had guided us through the day, and helped us when time for speeches came around. The evening passed so quickly, but we were busy dancing almost the whole time! Only taking a break for our first dance, to ‘A Thousand Years’, and to cut our amazing cake.
Tom and I had a perfect day! Which I’m sure almost everyone says about their wedding, but this really was everything we had wanted and more because of everyones contributions. Since the wedding all our friends and family keep complimenting us on our day, wishing they could do it all again too!
As an added comment I cant thank Cooling enough for conspiring with Tom and my sister who built me a full size Tardis as a wedding present! A massive surprise!
Id like to thank all our friends and family, groomsmaids, ushers for all their support, and also those family and friends who travelled around the world, literally, to spend the day with us. We've been so lucky to be surrounded by such supportive and lovely family from day one.