Sometimes, the best destination wedding isn’t at some far-flung location, but the place you already call home. Nowadays, so many couples around the world are, for a variety of reasons, choosing to tie the knot from the comfort of home. Hosting a wedding at home can vary dramatically in terms of format and frills, ranging from simple gatherings to more elaborate affairs. The motivations behind them also differ from couple to couple, spanning sentimental to situational to savings-oriented reasons. In general, a more hands-on and DIY approach to weddings is increasing in popularity. A Barclay’s study revealed that 91% of couples surveyed in the UK are taking a DIY approach to at least one aspect of their wedding, either by doing parts themselves or asking friends and family to help.
For Ivey Redding and Josh Warren, it was purely sentimental. Simply put, there was no other place they wanted to get married in. Their nuptials were a weekend-long affair at their parents’ home in Georgia. “Josh, my husband, and I spent a lot of time there throughout our relationship,” Redding explains. “Especially when my dad was sick—he had ALS—we spent a lot of time with my parents during COVID and helping take care of him. Weddings can become such a production, but having the intimacy of your home, or where you grew up, is really valuable. I wouldn’t have done it any other way.” There’s also the added perk of being able to visit your wedding venue whenever you want. “When we go home and visit, we walk in the backyard and we’re like, ‘Oh, we got married right here,’” she adds.
Sentimental reasons also compelled Flora Soames and her husband Alexander “Blondie” Macdonald-Buchanan to get married at home in England. “We had very clear ideas as to what really mattered to us. I’m very lucky to have grown up in this beautiful place in North Norfolk and that has been central to my upbringing and is at the heart of all of our families,” she says. “Having it at home was like a complete no-brainer. It’s like an extension of us.”
In Ashley Reese and Rob Stengel’s case, their wedding at home was a product of circumstance. “It was planned in literally a week because pretty much a week prior, on October 7, 2022, I got the news that my husband’s cancer was getting more aggressive and was not going to get better,” Reese says. “We initially wanted to do something at home that was kind of small, with maybe 20 people tops. That list ended up turning into over 100 people.” Luckily, one of Rob’s friends, Shina Bharadwaja, had experience organizing weddings and helped them pull the event together. “I still have moments where I’m like, ‘How the hell did we do that?’ I need to emphasize that we only did this with a lot of help,” Reese adds.
The pandemic threw many couples’ wedding plans into a loop. Project Runway judge and best-selling author Elaine Welteroth wed musician Jonathan Singletary on their Bed-Stuy stoop in a socially distanced wedding on May 10, 2020. The date was one of significance for them, as it represented the couple feeling truly ready for this next chapter of their lives and it was also Mother’s Day, which was a nod to their mothers who had met at their church choir when they were 12 years old. Welteroth recalls telling her now-husband, “Even if I have to marry you in my pj’s, on our freaking stoop, I am marrying you on 5/10/20,” and they did. In their case, doing something so pared down was actually a blessing in disguise. “When the world shut down and we were left to our own devices, all of the extra faded away and what we were left with was just the essentials,” she says. “It allowed us to re-center the entire ceremony around what really matters to us and the things that make us truly happy,” Welteroth says.
Joey Teixeira and Michael Keeney’s wedding at home was also not their plan A. After a series of unfortunate events (COVID cancellations, illness, and then a freak snowstorm) kept them from having their gathering at The Met on their original date, they decided to have their ceremony in their Upper West Side apartment. “Looking back, I would tell myself to relax because it ended up, even with all the changes, being absolutely perfect,” Teixeira says. “I wouldn’t have changed anything.”
In addition to sentimental and circumstantial reasons, there is another reason to have a wedding at-home: saving. Anna and Mark Newton had their wedding reception in their two-bedroom apartment in London. “The idea was that we had a kind of budget wedding day so that we could have a really good honeymoon. Our honeymoon was an almost month-long New Zealand trip that was just amazing and once in a lifetime,” she says. “We trusted our guts and it was just right for us.”
Saving money on your wedding day means you can spend it on the things that really matter to you, be it a honeymoon or a down payment for a home. “All that money that we were going to spend on a wedding, we used as a down payment for our first house together that we bought that October,” Welteroth says. Regarding the at-home wedding trend, she hopes that her own ceremony “inspires people to do it big in their own way and know that you don’t have to go broke trying to have a beautiful wedding, even outside of the pandemic.” Welteroth continues, “There are so many ways that you can make it special. Find where you want to invest and really center everything around your intention. Keep the main thing the main thing.”
While each of these weddings were unique, in speaking with each couple, there were recurring themes throughout their experiences. Below, they unpack what they loved and what they wished they had known before beginning the process. Read on for their advice on hosting your own wedding at home.
1. Accept the Constraints of Your Space
Size is an important, if not the most important, factor to consider when planning an at-home wedding. For the Newtons, the size of their apartment dictated how many people they could invite. “It’s a two-bed flat and we managed to squish 27 people into it. It was a bit of a tight squeeze,” she said. “The guest list is tricky with smaller intimate weddings. We had to be a bit strict—just parents, siblings, and grandparents.” Now, eight years after the wedding, she doesn’t have any regrets. “I don’t think years later everyone’s holding a personal vendetta against me,” Anna says. “I think a lot of people are a lot more understanding than you might expect them to be.”
Space was definitely top of mind for Reese and Stengel when they had their wedding in their Brooklyn brownstone apartment. “Space really becomes an issue, especially if you’re trying to invite a lot of people,” she explains. “You have to really be smart about how you set things up. Even the most basic things like arranging chairs, counting every little thing, doing this and that, it’s more responsibility on you.” On the day of their wedding, it was all-hands on deck to move furniture around and make space.
Reflecting on their wedding in their Upper West Side apartment, Teixeira notes that “if you live in an apartment building, you have to consider your neighbors, how noisy things are, and when you’re doing it. We live in a walk-up [with] only, like, eight apartments so it’s a quiet building and we had the space to do it.” They could comfortably fit around 20 people in their apartment, so that’s how many were invited to the intimate ceremony.
Choosing which part of your home to use is also an important decision. For Welteroth and Singletary, their stoop was the central focus. “This sounds randomly deep, but throughout the pandemic, we called our stoop a portal to the divine,” Welteroth says. “We didn’t have a backyard so our only outdoor space was our stoop. So while we were cooped up in our home, we would go on our stoop and play music—specifically Frankie Beverly and Maze’s song ‘Happy Feelings’—and we would dance. I wanted our wedding to feel like that times 10. I just knew immediately the only place I wanted to invest was in transforming our stoop into this magical altar that felt sacred and beautiful.” To execute this vision, the couple worked with Lewis Miller Design to build a stunning floral display on their stoop for their ceremony.
At Redding and Warren’s wedding, adapting their dream 100-foot dinner table to their curved driveway was an undertaking. “The tables were set up the day before because the driveway was curved, so we had to build connection points for each of the tables we rented. Our handyman in town built them for us,” Redding says. Although it required a fair bit of advance planning to make it happen, the end result was stunning.
2. Ask for Help and Delegate Tasks
The idea that many hands make light work was a recurring motif for every couple. Planning and producing an at-home wedding can be an immense undertaking and it shouldn’t be done alone. Reese and Stengel’s wedding was a group effort, and she wouldn’t have imagined it any other way.
“Our wedding couldn’t have happened without our community and it definitely couldn’t have turned out as nice as it did without them. We were prepared to not have a nice wedding at all, but my friends really helped step it up to make it happen,” Reese says. “I luckily barely had to do anything because Shina really took charge. She was like ‘I’m gonna have you do minimal calling,’ because that was also the same week Rob was in home hospice. I think because of the uniqueness of the situation people really came to help.”
Involving close friends and family, especially those who have experience with weddings and events, is a way to reduce the load. Even if you have a clear idea of what you want, having a person to help pull it together makes the day more enjoyable. “I have a great friend who has a planning company and she helped pull it together,” Soames explains. “I definitely knew what I wanted it to look like, so from a styling perspective that was covered, and Tattie Rose led the floral side of it, which was a lot.”
Help with the planning is essential, but some couples could have used more help on the day of the event. Redding admits that it would have been nice to have more hands on deck during the day of the wedding. “It would have been good to have somebody in charge overseeing the day. We had a day of coordinator, but it’s really just such a whole production,” she says. “Even for a small, at-home wedding, maybe having somebody help manage that day in a more hands-on way could have been helpful.”
Luckily, her family was up for the challenge. “I left my full family in charge of setting this 100-foot long table,” Redding recalls. “They did an awesome job. One of my cousins is very artistic and great at tablescape type stuff so I was just like, ‘Can you set this?’ I never even walked her through the way I wanted it to look.” Having people you can trust to execute the details is essential.
Welteroth and Singletary’s wedding was also a collaboration with close friends. Sinclair Bolden, a partner at Everyday People, and musician Adeline Bolden were instrumental in the planning if their special day. “Imagine being stuck in a pandemic and you end up planning your own wedding on your stoop and the only two people that you’re doing it with happen to be a freaking event producer of the dopest events that you’ve gone to and then the other one happens to be a musician and DJ,” she says. “Every element of our wedding fell into place and just felt right. It was this divine orchestration of our community coming together to make it all happen.”
3. Relish the Opportunity to Add Your Personal Touch
For creative couples, having a wedding at home is a prime opportunity to put their talents to good use. In Redding’s case, it was a true labor of love. “I love planning parties and planning things in general, so it felt like a big, creative project for me,” she says. “My mom and I are very DIY. We decided, for some reason, instead of renting serving platters, to go to local junk stores and buy old stoneware and old platters that we liked. All the napkins were my mom’s mix-matched white napkins and we collected so many candlesticks from antique stores. It was just a whole project, which was really fun.”
Soames, who is a textile and interior designer, enjoyed the ability to personalize the event as well. “I get that there are times in your life when you just don’t have the bandwidth for it, but for me, I’m a details person. Putting our stamp on it really mattered.” The end result was an event that felt wholly like them. “Every bit of it was very personal to us. And whilst it was all incredibly special and in many ways very opulent, in being at home there was the ability to have it feel very tailor-made but also at times quite informal,” she adds.
Having the wedding at home also made the event more child-friendly. “We had 17 bridesmaids and pages because Blondie and I have lots of godchildren and nephews and nieces. They were really central to the event,” Soames recalls. “After the church, we had our reception in my parents’ house, which is this very enveloping home, and I really wanted people to feel like they were coming into a house they could relax in, sit on the sofa, kick off their shoes, and get that sense of welcome and belonging.”
Adding a personal touch is possible for more than just the setting, you can also change up what you do at the event itself. The Newtons did just that. “We actually did a pub quiz,” Anna says. “I just feel like sometimes with weddings, there’s weird pockets of time where you’re not really sure what to do. So we put people in teams and everyone got really competitive. Then after that, the drinks flowed and we got pizza in.”
Opting for having a wedding at home also makes it possible to include your furry guests. “My pets were able to be there and it wasn’t super stressful,” says Teixeira, who serves as the director of philanthropy at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “As a true animal welfare person I tend to adopt older animals who might have different behavior or medical things. Two of our cats are blind and we had two very small dogs with behavior problems.” The animals were able to join in the events at-home when they wouldn’t have been able to come to a more traditional venue.
4. Get Clear on What’s Most Important to You
Just because your wedding is at home, that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t feel special. For some couples, decorating their space was the most important. For others, splurging on their dream photographer was where they wanted to spend money. Whatever it was, each couple recommended getting clear on what they did and didn’t want to compromise on.
For Teixeira and Keeney, making their space feel different than it does on any other day was a high priority. “I was like, ‘If we’re going to do it in the apartment, it has to be special and it has to feel like it’s not just in our apartment,’” Teixeira says. That’s where decoration can make all the difference. “I found these really long string Christmas lights that we wrapped around half the apartment and I bought 75 of these little electric votive things and placed them everywhere.”
Decorations don’t necessarily have to be expensive to make an impact. Reese used a combination of higher-cost vendors with lower-cost materials to make the space feel entirely new. “Some of the streamers in the backgrounds on our main wedding photo and the stand thing are from Amazon,” she says. “The Amazon decor mixed with a fancy celebrity florist mixed with a Costco cake was just such a highbrow-lowbrow kind of wedding and I think that was also just perfect for us.”
When it comes to decorating, you can splurge on some aspects and save on others. “It’s not necessarily about one little detail or another. It’s about what you do with what you have. And luckily I have a lot of creative friends,” Reese explains. “Florals helped a lot. It’s kind of insane how big of an impact they made. There were flowers everywhere and the entryway of where guests were coming in looked incredible.” One of Reese and Stengel’s friends gifted them their photography and their florals which were done by Pejy Kash. “I know flowers are so expensive. But I will say that they really did elevate the space,” she says.
Florals were an aspect that was really important to Soames as well. “I collaborated with this fantastic floral designer, Tattie Rose, who lives in the country near me,” she says. “She was amazing with scale and foraging and using completely seasonal flowers. It was very naturalistic—making the inside an extension of what was going on outside.”
For Redding, who is a wedding photographer and videographer herself, finding the right person to capture her day was of utmost importance. “Documentation is probably where I put the most emphasis in terms of budgeting.” she emphasizes. “I found this photographer that I followed for a while named Hannah Shea and she’s incredible. She shot most of the wedding on film and I am so happy with the way the photos turned out. They feel very timeless and special.”
Warren also felt the same way about investing in working with your dream photographer. “In my opinion, if you’re gonna spend money, documenting is really important, more than florals or even food,” he argues. “Documenting is the most important because people might not remember what they ate, but you can always look back on the photos.” Teixeira and Keeney’s photos taken by Rachel Leiner are ones they will cherish forever.
5. Be Flexible
As with any wedding, things are bound to go wrong no matter how much you plan ahead. Hosting your wedding at home means there is even more room for error, so it’s a risk that shouldn’t be taken lightly. As Redding explains, “If you get married at a venue, they’ve already done and taken care of all the logistics. For an at-home wedding, there are random things that need to get done.”
However, just because there is more to think about for a wedding at home, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be a stressful experience. “There is more work, especially the week leading up to and also the dismantling of it all. At a venue, you can drive away and then it’s no longer your problem” Soames says. But she didn’t see that as a reason to be discouraged. “If you want the full three-sixty of the event and you have a home that lends itself to whatever type of wedding you choose, I think it’s a really lovely personal extension of what you’re doing both in the wedding itself and the experience as a whole.”
The unsexy parts of event planning include thinking about bathroom capacity, cleaning everything before and after, avoiding noise ordinances, and worrying about outlets. With an at-home wedding, no one is in charge of those things but you and your partner. “The only regret I have is us not having the foresight to remove one of my really nice rugs from this brand, Alfie,” she says. “It was the most expensive rug I’ve ever bought and now it has perfect barbecue sauce stains on it. So my advice is make sure all the rugs are gone.”
Welteroth views the tighter constraints that an at-home wedding requires as a positive, not a negative. “I hope that people continue to be inspired to think outside the box about their weddings and not let tradition or budget constraints restrict their creativity. For us, the tighter the constraints, the more creativity,” she argues. “It’s not about the designer dress. It’s not about the big expensive venue. It’s not even about the food. We had no food at our wedding, and that’s not what people are remembering, they’re remembering how they felt.”
