The beautiful Tatyana and dashing Vadim came to me with a challenge. They had picked out the perfect venue for their wedding, The Gardens at Elm Bank. Over coffee at Starbucks one Sunday morning, they explained that the idyllic grounds would serve as the perfect backdrop for their ceremony. The carriage house however, though spacious and grand, did not have the architectural quality they were hoping for. Their original plan was to drape the entire exposed ceiling in fabric, a treatment that while beautiful, turned out to be very expensive. Also, provisions would have have had to be made for the HVAC system to operate.
My challenge then was to work with the ceiling (and space overall) and transform it to something magical. The first order of business was the existing house lighting. Sconces around the room were fitted with a cold, almost fluorescent white bulbs. I replaced them with LED edison bulbs to give the room a warm glow. The next step was to deal with the exposed ceiling. A friend who is an architect once told me that if you can't hide an element you don't like, enhance it, call attention to it, and make it look like it's was built just for the purpose of being seen.
That said my goal was instead of distracting from the ceiling, to call attention to it. We brought in large (almost 5ft wide) balloons and fitted them with my favorite Astera fixtures. The lightweight fixtures and balloons allowed us to hang them from the metal truss ceiling with magnets - no ladders needed. Plus, the lighting colors could match the rest of the room as the light fixtures themselves communicate wirelessly. Additionally, pointing colored light up toward the trusses created a controlled-chaos of shadows across the ceiling making it appear less like structural elements and more like the twisted canopy of tree branches throughout the grounds.
Working with Tatyana and Vadim, I came up with a serious of color themes that would be brought up during different times of the evening, and turned the entire room into a dance floor at the end of the evening. The results speak for themselves. Tatyana and Vadim effortlessly executed the roles of leading lady and man in their custom-created production.