My Hangar Wedding
When I met F for the first time, I immediately understood that it would be great fun to work with her and for her. She is an adorable girl. So when I also met M, I was, well, madly in love with them ;-).
Spontaneous, eager, beautiful, open minded, enthusiasts and ready to evaluate new ideas and possibilities.
If you think of it, when we first met with F, she said she was aiming at a Castello or a Villa on the hills. Never would she have imagined ending up where we eventually did ;-) !!
Again at our first meeting, F said she envisioned somehow using travel as a theme: her fiancé was an airline pilot, for months he had flown the Dubai route, where she had occasionally followed him along and they had also imagined a life there. They were often “in the air” and she really liked it.
We need to open a bracket here. It is quite normal for a bride-to-be to imagine her wedding and to “construct” it by mixing together a number of elements she picked up from past wedding events attended as a guest. However there is a limitation in that most Italian weddings follow very similar and conservative patterns. How can a girl, whose professional life is completely devoid of any familiarity with event organisation, get a different stimulus? Either you are very interested in the subject and you have time to do some research and find documentation, or you end up going along the same trodden paths.
A second bracket needs opening: as I explained here, creativity in my opinion is not a providential gift, or at least not entirely. It is rather a matter of educating oneself to recognise the hints, the stimuli and the props coming from the surroundings and it’s a matter of somehow “storing” them; at a certain point you recollect them and propose them in a completely different context, at the right time, with the right people, thus providing a new and personal interpretation.
This is what happened to me with them.
Pilot. Travel. Planes…My mental hamster wheels started whizzing around and all ended up in the same place: a hangar. In the past, while scouring through my favourite blogs, I had encountered several inspiration shootings and some events organised and held in a hangar. Of course it was the United States, and certainly not in Italy. I knew however that there were some hangars in Italy also used for cultural or corporate events. What about here? In Torino or vicinity? Would we be able to find one? And, if we did by any chance find one, would it be made available for a private event?
I could not keep these thoughts to myself as the whole research process would have required a lot of effort. So I wanted to make sure that at least they liked the idea: it was my call and I had to take the risk of putting forward an idea they liked and that might not be doable in the end. The Play was worth the Candle….;-)
When F. came up with a “wow!” as a first reaction I was overwhelmed with joy and there it all started. Fortune favours the brave! And by the end of my research I realised I could not have been any luckier. I had found it. It was exactly as I had imagined, in a word: perfect. Considering that it had never before held any kind of event, the managers, were indeed happy to consider and evaluate the possibility… Eureka!!
Once a “technical” survey was done and the feasibility was assessed, we had to present a project at the Association’s Board Members’ meeting for them to consider an approval. After a few weeks’ wait, we got a confirmation.
It is certainly not one of the first locations you think of for a wedding, but from a logistics and operational point of view it proved to be largely better than many villas or castles!
Passages suitable for supplier vehicles; large open air and covered spaces; no stairs or areas with challenging access; electric boards, running water, parking and a breathtaking view on all the surrounding Alps; no neighbouring buildings in the area; less than ten minutes from the Church where the wedding was celebrated; location manager and staff displaying the most exquisite kindness and spirit of collaboration…everything need was there.
Even when the catering team came round for a location review they admitted the location was simply perfect for its job. The only drawback was the toilet facility issue, which we brilliantly overcame by agreeing with the control tower café on how we could use theirs.
As icing on the cake, so to say, we could also allow our newlyweds to arrive “by air”, landing on the airstrip right in front of their unknowing guests.
In the meantime we put together our mood board and we commented together every single image. We concluded that the location itself was a bit of a “gamble” and quite a “sharp edged” one too: we needed to smooth the edges. An excessive modernity of the set-up would only increase this aspect , so we had to remain more “rounded” and more “romantic”. Our idea was to create a slightly dreamy warm and welcoming atmosphere. So it was going to be a no to bright lighted tables, no to a coloured or glamorous light design, and no to transparent Philippe Stark chairs. Yes, to vintage lights suspended in mid air, so as to lower the perceived ceiling height and get a more intimate and cozy feeling. Yes, to wooden Chiavari chairs; yes, to the round tables that would entail a better use of the available space.
The hangar lights were cold and we could not use them, but the suspended lights were not enough, so we had to revert to supplementing them with table lights. Any flames in the hangar would be a security issue (with planes to be kept parked in proximity) so we opted for battery charged stem based table lights (they project a cone of light on the table without interfering with the hall’s light design.) We decided to somewhat integrate the light into the centrepiece with which we developed and interpreted the flight theme: a base with flower and greenery on which we suspended a cloud and some paper aeroplanes.
We created a coordinated set based on the all Italian play on words VOLARE and “conVOLARE a nozze” which encapsulates the verb “to fly” within the verb “to wed”: so, balsa wood planes were used as escort cards (and gift for the guests); the fingerprint guestbook and the backdrop for the Photo Booth we also theme based, as were the polaroids of engagement shooting (you can see it here) used in the set-up…I really loved the many little details in this project…
I was thrilled to team up with these two adorable spouses. They were not afraid to make mistakes and they saw the final objectives with me, taking decisive steps and with little hesitations (remember the first rule? review it here). I was also extremely happy with the talented combination of Carlo +Fabio and Valeria+Alberto managed to fix for all future memoirs this gorgeous day.
The video can be missed too!
Wedding Design and planning: That Day di Monica Ferraris