How To Make a Wedding at The Savoy, London Feel Unique

For couples planning a London wedding, a luxury London hotel venue like The Savoy appeals because of its illustrious reputation and second-to-none service. If you’re looking for a wedding that feels quintessentially city chic, but also wondering whether you can truly make a hotel ballroom celebration feel unique, join me as I go back to D&M’s Savoy wedding and prove that it can most definitely be done. With planning tips for theming your wedding, the secret to transforming a ballroom, and the trick to a memorable guest experience.

Can you make a wedding at The Savoy feel really unique?

Having worked for many years at The Ritz, I have a real appreciation for the art of five star hotels in London. I also deeply understand how luxury runs, to a large degree, on consistency, order, and repeatedly doing the ‘done’ thing really well, to earn that iconic reputation. 

As a wedding planner, I love how the premium hospitality world unfurls into the wedding world – there’s nothing like knowing your couples’ experience at their venue is going to be the absolute last word – however, I also appreciate the challenges that come with this. 

Getting married at such an illustrious venue as The Savoy comes with some trade-offs, which is why working with a great wedding planner can be the key to making your celebrations there feel unique. 

Luxury hotel wedding venues like the Savoy are more synonymous with classic elegance than cool quirkiness, but you might feel drawn to both the feeling of being totally looked after and the pull of a completely unique wedding. 

Recommended supplier lists may feel restrictive, a ballroom is a ballroom that has to be transformed, and isn’t what I’d describe as a ‘blank canvas’ in terms of decor. 

At the end of the day, though…it’s The Savoy. Getting married there is an epic occasion, and we have plenty of tricks up our sleeve to make your luxury hotel wedding utterly one of a kind – just ask D&M, whose real Savoy wedding we’ll use to show you just how it’s done.

The art of transforming a space: Savoy wedding decor

Taking a wedding venue like The Savoy and making it unrecognisable as anything but your celebration means considering every detail. M&D’s wedding was a masterclass in monogramming, with their intertwined initials appearing on everything from the invitations to the dancefloor, and we used their beautiful backstory to plan the colour palette, florals and dinner tablescapes.

Theming a Savoy wedding

Working with a theme at a wedding doesn’t have to mean cheesy or over the top, just having a story that weaves throughout the day and connects one element to the next. It helps you feel truly at home in your own wedding, and your guests relax into the day and enjoy it to the full. 

M&D’s theme was based around the bride (an English rose) coming together with her groom (a Scottish thistle), and their pretty monogram was surrounded by a garland of interwoven flowers to reflect this. We also worked with a dusky thistle blue and rose pink colour palette, and these elements carried throughout the whole day. 

Some of my favourite themed touches at this Savoy wedding were:

Flowers for a Savoy wedding

As you might imagine, the florals were pretty important for this wedding since we had the thistle and rose theme running throughout. For the ceremony D’s bridal bouquet featured pretty dusky pink roses, and waiting at the end alongside her groom was an incredible floral arch, flanked by gorgeous pillar wraps to frame the couple during their vows. 

Florals are one of the most impactful ways to transform a space at a luxury London hotel venue like The Savoy, and make it feel more unique. The Abraham Lincoln room was almost unrecognisable once we covered the patterned carpet and flooded the space with abundant florals.

Later, the arch was moved into the Lancaster Ballroom to sit behind M&D as they dined, and along with the dynamic mixture of high and low floral table centrepieces, perfectly pulled out the delicate duck egg blue of the walls to fit their colour scheme perfectly. I’m always in awe of the talented florists at my couples’ weddings, and it was no different in the case of Hayford and Rhodes at The Savoy!

The finishing touch was the cake decorated with rose and thistle clusters, simple and stunning and perfect for D&M’s florally-led wedding.

Curating the guest experience at The Savoy

Simply arriving at a wedding at The Savoy is an experience in itself for your loved ones, but we never stop there with an Ella Hartig wedding. One of the highlights of D&M’s occasion was the London Function Band, who are famous for playing as your guests enter the dinner space. It sets the tone, gets the energy up, and this epic group comes highly recommended by me!

Guests sat down to their own personalised embroidered napkins, with their name below D&M’s monogram – a gorgeous alternative to a wedding favour that will actually be kept and treasured, and probably even used again and again!

The family entrance into dinner was possibly one of my favorite moments of all my weddings to date, and that’s really saying something. As they entered, they were announced as all having the same surname for the first time ever (the children had officially changed their names to match their step father’s), and the emotional weight of the moment was palpable in the room.

I honestly believe they’ll remember that moment forever, and that’s the absolute heart of everything we do when planning these magical weddings.

Giving your guests a great experience throughout the day is undoubtedly one of the factors that keeps your dance floor full at the end of the night, and D&M’s wedding was a testament to this – that party never lulled once, all night long!

Planning your unique wedding at The Savoy

Getting married at an iconic London wedding venue such as The Savoy is almost guaranteed to be a wonderful experience, and if you want your celebrations to feel inimitable and infinitely memorable, you’ll need to work with a wedding planner. 

Get in touch if you’d like to discuss your London wedding plans, and how to make your luxury hotel celebrations unique.

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Frequently asked about weddings at The Savoy…

Do I need a wedding planner at The Savoy, even though they have an in-house wedding team?

Wedding venue planning teams and independent wedding planners have very different roles, and if you’re looking to make your Savoy wedding unique, do something a little different to what you’ve seen online, and feel supported from beginning to end, I highly recommend working with a luxury wedding planner such as myself. 

The in-house team at your wedding venue looks at everything through the lens of your venue, whereas I look at everything through the lens of you. My top priority is you, advocating for everything that you want, taking care of every detail (even the ones you’d forgotten you’d mentioned). Your venue’s planning team is primarily there to make sure everything runs smoothly from their perspective. Both have their place, but I wouldn’t recommend skipping a planner.

Where can my wedding take place at The Savoy?

There are a number of rooms available to you for your wedding at The Savoy, and they all radiate heart-of-London history and ornate design. When viewing the spaces, remember that in order to transform the feel of the room you’ll need production, florals, lighting…all things a wedding planner can help you visualise and understand what’s possible. 

The Savoy’s interiors are exquisite, but if they’re completely not your taste then you might be better looking at an alternative venue – you can always alter how the rooms look and feel, but you have to love the vibe to some degree to begin with.

How many guests can my Savoy wedding have?

The Savoy has spaces to hold large numbers of guests, but most Ella Hartig weddings have 200 guests or fewer. 

Contact Ella for luxury London wedding planning.