Chris and Jacqui’s Fabulously Funky Wedding at Harburn House, West Lothian

The Scottish Wedding ( Photography ) season still continues relentlessly for us and I’m still playing blog catch up on all the weddings we’ve photographed, so I thought it was about time I showed you the images from the fabulous wedding that Jacqui and Chris Bassett created a few weeks back.  The amount of creative effort that went into the design and planning of this wedding was stunning.

Jacqui was born in Scotland but now lives in America with English-born Chris. So all of this wedding was planned from a distance and when you see how good a job they did of it, you can appreciate the talents of this couple.

Harburn House Estate in West Lothian is a truly stunning Scottish Wedding Venue. The venue is not a hotel as such, but a private home that can be hired for weddings and other events. The estate is huge, and is the first venue where I’ve had to use my car just to get from one part of the venue to the other. (Full info on hiring the venue for Weddings at Harburn House can be found here )

The wedding venue itself presented some wonderful opportunities to get some stunning wedding photographs, but that was just the start of it. To paraphrase the famous marketing slogan, if Carlsberg made Weddings, they would have been involved in this one.

First up was Jacqui’s stunning bouquet. This was no ordinary or even extraordinary floral bouquet – this was rock and roll metal! Yep a metal bouquet – fashioned from lots of individual brooches that Jacqui asked her friends and relatives to send her.  She also asked them to send her the story behind the brooch which she has written up and intends to hand it down to any future children along with the bouquet. The bouquet was designed by a Californian designer who can be found at www.fantasyfloraldesigns.com

Next let’s talk about the shoes. Alexander McQueen’s no less and with skulls on. Yep you can tell a bloke designed these – totally cool!

Next up, how about a Proclaimers singalong during your wedding ceremony – everyone was handed out a lyrics sheet, in the same art-deco design that ran throughout her wedding stationery.

Then the cars – you’ve got to love a VW Camper van and a soft-top Beetle. Then how about parking that VW Beetle right in the middle of a field full of lavender so that we can get some fabulous photos – thank you Ecosse Classic Cars for being brave enough to park the car in this rather damp and soggy field. Of course the funkiness continues when we realise the field is absolutely infested with lots of little frogs – does Jacqui flinch at the odd frog or two hopping up the inside of her dress – not a jot!  This couple totally rocked.

Then it was on to dinner at the permanent marquee housed on the Harburn House estate – wild flowers formed the stunning centrepieces on the tables and the table plan was probably the most unique table plan I’ve every seen. Each table was named after a city that Jacqui and Chris had been to on their travels. Then they found art-deco postcards from each of those cities – the reverse of those card then listed the people sitting at those table – the photographs below do a better job of explaining this than I do.

Lastly, you’ve got to love it when the Groom and Best Man are a couple of ex-DJ’s who just had to have a proper lighting setup with fog machines. Fantastic.

And after all that we’ve not even talked about Jacqui’s fabulously stunning Wedding Dress, or Chris’s designer suit (with more skulls), or the Ice-Cream Wedding Cake, or the amazing table favors – for those finer details you’ll just have to wait until the next issue of Best Scottish Weddings magazine who will be featuring this wedding in their next edition. Well done Jacqui and Chris.

Weddings like this always present some wonderful opportunities for stunning wedding photography, so please allow me to show you my favourite images from the day, which was very difficult as their were so many to choose from.   Family and friends can view the full set of wedding photographs here.

We have had a very full wedding season this year, starting relatively slowly but then marching at an incredible pace right through the year. Our last wedding of 2010 is not until the 30th of December.  Fortunately we have a 4 week gap in a couple of weeks for us to recharge the batteries at our holiday home in Florida, before a very very busy December.

Wedding season 2011 kicks off for us at the end of January and we already have 30 weddings booked for 2011. We also have a large number of bookings into 2012 and 2013 enquiries are starting to pop up as well.   So if you are planning a wedding and would like us to photograph it, please contact us as early in your planning process as you can to avoid disappointment. You can contact us using the “Contact” Menu at the top of the page, or give us a call on 01259 210299.  We look forward to hearing from you.

In the meantime, please feel free to leave your comments and feedback on Chris and Jacqui’s wedding below – our clients love to read the comments on the blog, so please don’t be shy.