Venue manager
Sylvie Marchand
Your single point of contact from first email to last dance. Sylvie has run three hundred Elmswood weddings and still watches every ceremony from the yew walk.
The Estate
Four generations, one lawn.
Elmswood has been the Elms family's since the limes went in, in 1868. It has hosted weddings only, one at a time, since 2009, and it shows: the whole place is tuned to one kind of day.
The house that learned to host
Robert Elms planted the lime walk in 1868 and raised the orangery for his wife's citrus trees two years later. The house has passed hand to hand down one family since then. It has never been sold or split, and it has never been carved into apartments.
Margaret and Tom took the estate on in 2009 and made the decision the family had circled for a century: open the gates, but for one celebration at a time. It has been forty weddings a year since, and never two at once.
One wedding at a time
The people the reviews name
The garden
Margaret Elms
Fourth-generation Elms. The borders, the lime walk and the roses on your tables are hers, and she cuts for each wedding herself, that morning.
The kitchen
Tom Elms
Tom runs the estate kitchen with a brigade of six. One menu is written with you in winter and tasted twice, and it is on the pass by spring. It is all cooked here rather than delivered on a van.
The grounds, walked in order
The wedding day moves through the estate the way the numbers run, court to lawn to glass to terrace, and none of it is more than four minutes' walk from the rest in flat shoes or otherwise.
01 → 04 · the order the day walks
A kitchen that cooks for one wedding
The kitchen cooks for one wedding at a time, which changes everything. Your menu is the only menu and the tasting is in the house, and dinner is plated forty steps from your table.
One wedding at a time
It is the whole idea of the place: the spaces are yours alone, with one party on the estate and nobody on the lawn who is not yours. The covenant is written into each contract we sign.
Come and count the limes yourself.
An hour at golden hour, unhurried, with the people who keep the place. The lawn does the persuading and we mostly carry the tea.
Walk the grounds with us