New Ruche Pastel Wedding Collection

We felt this was too exciting not to share and thanks to Green Wedding Shoes for introducing Ruche's new wedding collection which is being launched on the 19th March.

We are already an avid fan of their clothes and accessories and are delighted that Ruche are now creating vintage, feminine wedding and bridesmaids dresses with a focus on embroidery and intricate detailing.

We are in love the pastels and neutrals, a huge fashion statement this year mixed with metallics and even more amazing are the prices with wedding dresses below $500 and bridesmaids retailing at around $100.

All brides must pop over and take a sneak peek at Green Wedding Shoes and in the meantime we have about 4 more sleeps until this gorgeous new collection is launched.

I have no doubt we will see many more gorgeous photos and will share these with you.

Spanish Wedding Inspiration

We are always looking for spanish wedding inspirations and just had to share this with you.  A Hip Hacienda wedding created by the hugely amazing Lisa Vorce.

I love the rustic qualities of this wedding, steering away from the conventional wedding furniture and chairs and using the dark woods combined with hessian textures and the terracotta containers.  One thing I think flags up in this delightful wedding is the attention to the stationery and the details, it is the use of the teal design on the chairs and churros bags that brings this wedding to life and of course we love the papel picado.

Ombre for Weddings!

We love this new trend called Ombre, a French term meaning shaded.

It is popping up everywhere in wedding world.

I did see a bit of this trend last year with bridesmaids dresses in different shades of one colour.  We are even seeing coloured wedding dresses this year and I have seen some die for evening dresses that I am secretly coveting :)!

Ombre is a lovely idea and the cakes with this shaded design are gorgeous, even the insides are shaded layers which look divine and very eatable! 

Whether your chosen colour palette is pink, purple, blues, yellows (a huge colour in fashion world too at the moment) this idea of applying different shades of one colour to your wedding details is definitely worth considering.

Perhaps a cocktail going from dark to light, a cake or even this fabulous ribbon backdrop or your table centrepieces. 

Ombre is going to be a big hit this year and we will see a lot more of this by the autumn.

Wedding Trends Bright Neons

The NEON trend hit the fashion world last year and of course is now being translated into wedding world and we are seeing these bright pops of colour becoming increasingly and boldly used. 

I think, as a designer, the key element when using these fabulous and riotous colours is to tone it down with the cooler colours, whites works with me all the time!

 We have the soft greys combined with the zingy yellows, citrusy greens combined with plenty of whites and pops of hot pinks and cobalt blues combined with paler shades of nude pinks and whites.

Get it right and the end results will be fabulous and make a strong colour statement, get it wrong and it will be a mess of riotous colours!

This style is funky though and would suit a young and retro bride, we have a few weddings with strong colour statements in this year, mainly the bright yellow but just little details here and there which will be stunning.

Images found via Pinterest

Dramatic Spanish Style For Weddings

As many of our clients wish to incorporate an element of Spain into their weddings here, we are constantly looking for Spanish style inspirations to add touches of Spain's wonderful and dramatic culture into our weddings and parties. 

We love this fabulous shoot featured on Wedluxe using a stunning combination of black lace, red roses and golds, it reminds me of the beautiful churches we have here adorned with gold candelabras and candles. 

We have been working very hard here this winter and many of our weddings coming up this year have some beautifully designed styling and details. 

We have one in Sevilla that is going to be stunning and we will feature sneak peeks as we build up to the big day, our gorgeous vintage fan invitations are winging their way to London as I type :) 

We have a Sevillian orange rustic style wedding, fabulous vintage style lace weddings and the rest of our designs are currently well kept secrets as we reveal some stunning new ideas throughout 2012!

Romantic White and Floral Wedding Inspiration

Who does not love white with flashes of colour and this week I found some fabulous cakes on Pinterest that prompted me to do this gorgeous floral mixed with white blogpost.

Sometimes with Pinterest it is not easy to see the original source of all the fabulous photos that are pinned, but I have taken time to see who these fantastic cakes are made by and I think this comes from Amelies House and her creations are gorgeous.

I love the colours and themes of the birds and florals and this would be the basis for a very pretty wedding theme with the cute birdhouses and delightful details.  It is much cleaner and fresher than previous vintage style themes.

I have also noticed this year golds are definitely back in combined with pastel colours and I hope this inspiration board emulates the latest trend not perhaps with weddings but generally in interiors which of course will follow suit in the wedding world.

Ombre Cushions :)

It is widely known that I have a cushion obsession and just had to share these fabulous rosette cushions with you from Etsy, aren´t they just divine and I love the Ombre touch.

I can see my lounge being transformed in the next few months and how fabulous to have a wedding or party chill out with this idea :)

Spring Inspirations

I love our 'wedding' blog and adore running our fabulous wedding planning and styling business here in Spain, but I started life as an interior stylist and designer.

I am fortunate that the wedding business I own takes up all my time now, but of course I still have a keen eye for what is new in interiors and styling.

It is this time of year I love scanning through ideas, for my own home, and to keep up with trends, ideas and inspirations for our weddings.

I had an interesting day today reading through my blog (I was actually trying to find one particular post!)  but I was quite intrigued as to how we were predicting trends last year that are only just emerging this year.

Two sprang to mind, one was the metallics and the other was the more formal romantic look of the feather and jewels coming back into weddings and stepping away slightly from the vintage look. 

Decadence is making a comeback albeit slowly and bit by bit we will see more luxurious weddings emerging with a few more jewels and florals. 

I just wanted to share this gorgeous photo with you as this is my bedroom inspiration from Zara Home and how I have decided to spend my much pleaded for Christmas vouchers but what a fabulous inspiration too for a fresh and floral wedding design :)

Pink and Gold Christmas Inspiration

Top Row 1st and 2nd image Better Homes & Gardens, 3rd Image Citrus & Orange, 4th Image Pinterest.
Second row Image 1,2 & 3 Citrus & Orange, 4 & 5 Image Unknown

Pink and Golds are definitely the in Christmas colour this year and are all over blog world.

I love them as these are the colours I have every year and mine are mixed with silvers and lots of crystal too collected over the years. I also use olive green as it is the other colour in my home but this year I am excited about using a touch of purple and deep turquoise too with lots of golds to bring a slightly grander feeling to our Christmas table. I have the crackers already and bought some beautiful olive charger plates and now on a search for a deep magenta velvet ribbon!

I thought with all these fabulous images I have found it would be lovely to create an inspiration board to share with you.

You really must head over to the Citrus and Orange blogspot, it is one of my favourite blogs and I can´t wait to see what Susana will be posting next as she shares her Christmas decoration ideas with us.

We also have some beautiful Christmas trees to share with you this week, sent in by our brides from the past few years and some of our brides for 2012 as we all get festive and share our creative ideas together!

Wedding Venues in Marbella and Sotogrande

I love this time of year.

November is getting chilly outside and as we wind down from our flurry of weddings it is lovely to look through and study all the photos from 2011 as we create new portfolios and look books for our studio.

It does take time to process the year and reflect on our work in order to refresh ourselves for our new year.

We are now working on our 2012 weddings and have some very sparky, creative brides on board so looking forward to our winter workshops and brain storming with them!

Today I have been organising photos not only for our portfolios in the studio, but also we have been asked to submit some of our favourite weddings to many hi profile wedding portals which is very exciting.

We are currently organising photos and will be in contact with our clients should their wedding be successful in our submissions to gain approval.

Having been browsing today I had to share this fabulous venue with you, we planned and designed a wedding here in September and I am in love with these photos.

For me they epitomize a Mediterranean evening, the lighting is stunning and this wedding was certainly one big party! Set in a monastery in Sotogrande in fabulous grounds this was a truly stunning setting for our client´s wedding.

We have also been out and about as well recently looking at new venues for weddings and as well as this monastery, we now have a fabulous 23 bedroomed converted convent on our books with it´s own chapel which is licensed for weddings.

You can party all night without noise restrictions. It is beautifully presented and restored and has a whole host of interesting areas to move around in, from the chiringuito bar area for the cocktail or perhaps the inner courtyard, to a fantastic setting for the dinner and dancing, a real hideaway set in the heart of Andalucian natural parkland.

These images above were provided to us by Anna Gazda of our stunning wedding in Sotogrande and having been scouring through all our weddings I wanted to share these with you again as I love them!

I might finally add that our day of venue searching ended up with us driving around looking for a zoo, which we found but was shut, apparently this area has a fabulous lake that we seemed to have missed so we will have to head back, the town I found enchanting and has a large hotel there for guests, we ended up on this day literally driving over the polo fields in Sotogrande, so not entirely sure that Carla wants to come out with me again on a venue reccie! She seemed glad to get out the car at the end of our day! :)

Hiring A Wedding Planner in Marbella

Google Weddings in Spain and a whole host of websites will leap out at you.
Some are gruesome, some are OK, some are quite interesting and some are fab and exactly how you see your dream day in Andalucia.

The heart of Spain is a popular destination wedding area and many couples dream of a beautifully hot sunny wedding on the beach or inland in the olive groves of Andalucia.

However, for busy professional people, and perhaps, the not so busy, the thought of spending over 6 weeks, in total, planning your wedding abroad becomes an impossible task so having googled all the possibilities available to you, you finally email a few companies, not the gruesome ones! to see how much damage they will do to your already over stretched wedding budget.

(Note to most of our brides at this point H2B is normally breathing down your neck and this is usually the first potential row on the horizon as you throw your organised wedding planning role in)!

You have contemplated doing it yourself to save on money and have found enough information on the internet to book your dream day, but as the wedding planning progresses you hit a wall, run out of time and the actual thought of your mobile phone lodged firmly down the front of your wedding dress on your actual wedding day is not appealing.

Worse still the thought of your parents manning the phones is just not even thinkable let alone acceptable, if they are anything like mine they can barely text! I am not even going to go down the best mate or sister is great route this is truly not on the cards!

This is normally when the sleepless nights and nightmares start!

You have no idea whether the suppliers you have booked even exist, let alone are reliable, and of course you want to enjoy your day and not be worried and at your wits end by the time you say I do :)

Having had yet another sleepless, harrowing night you have been up early and narrowed down your top 5 websites so you throw caution to the wind and email them, you might have even been super organised and booked the venue so you google that as well to see who has worked there.

Lo and behold you get prices, information and feedback from 3 out of the 5 planners you have contacted, three super speedy and efficient planners have replied within 48 hours, tick a box, good start.

The other two will reply after your wedding whilst you are on honeymoon in the Maldives 4 months later.
We are in Spain after all said and done!

Some seem cheap, great news, some have planning added on as bolt on to their company, better still, kill two birds with one stone, well hopefully not at your wedding!
Others even offer free wedding websites, yipee yet another saving in the wild and rocky world of wedding budgets :) H2B´s are normally impressed with this one!

But what do you really want, are you really interested in a free wedding website?
Let´s face it Google offer a whole host of wedding tools including websites to help you plan your wedding. Try googling free wedding websites and you would be amazed at what pops up, but that is a different blogpost!

So you want a run of the mill wedding, a venue or a church, or both as they are offered, that obviously churns out wedding after wedding or do you want something different, tailor made, created just for you?

I would hazard a guess that the majority of couples would shout yes please it is all about us and our day, it is special but we have a budget and want to use it to the maximum.

The 10K hotel conveyor belt is looking interesting and by now quite appealing, fitting within your budget and includes, if you are lucky, a free taxi to the church but is this really you?

Finally, thank the saving grace of Google, you have found the perfect planner, they have organised lots of weddings and only charge a few hundred euros, result!

Yet, apparently they will spend about 80 man hours running around for you and organising your dream day, they will be there for at least 10 hours on your actual wedding day, will recommend and organise suppliers, pay suppliers and all the things that tick the boxes. Heaven has just landed on your doorstep and you are sold.

But hold on a minute, think about it, are they really going to run around for you and devote their life and time to you for on an average of 90 hours for 800 euros? This is less than 10 euros an hour?

No of course they are not, many planners here in Spain only work with suppliers that will offer them a commission, it is normal apparently and makes good business practise?!

I quote this from a wedding planner here who was surprised when I stated I was not offering or accepting commissions. We have since parted company needless to say as I am not feathering their nest anymore. I also did not want to jump onto yet another conveyor belt wedding scenario belting out wedding after wedding at one particular venue as this is just not our style.

So they have charged you what you think is a fair fee but are you happy in the knowledge that they are probably raking in at least another 1000 euros from all the suppliers they book for your wedding? Normally without your knowledge or disclosing to you what they are being paid from the suppliers.

Do you think this is conducive to a close working relationship? Or are you left wondering how much that wedding cake would have really cost had you booked directly or how much the DJ really charges, how much the caterers, a large budget, hand over to the planner?

Are you confident that your planner is offering you the right choices of suppliers or is merely driven by how much commission they will get and perhaps not suggesting the right person for your wedding as they don´t pay commission?

I know planners that will not recommend photographers because they make such a huge commission from one particular one that is in my opinion rubbish, but this is all the client is offered. To be honest the stories I could tell are horrifying and it abhors me that this goes on in wedding world here.

I have two sides to my business, the design, decoration and floral business is fantastic and offers an amazing range of decorations and flowers and yet many planners will not recommend us because we do not pay commissions to them but why should we.

All it means is we cut the clients budget by 10% so they are not getting their true value spent, we would have to provide something that accommodated the price not what the client was actually paying, this for me is unacceptable.

Sad but true unfortunately and yet we are unique here in what we offer, there is no one else like us that provide such a great service and encompasses so many things from chair covers and sashes, linens, vintage furniture hire, flowers, stationery the list goes on and on.

But many planners will just recommend the florist down the road because they rake in yet another 10% commission from them. Is this right?

Our planning business charges a fee for our professional services, but we do not accept commissions from our suppliers so what does this mean to you?

For me personally it means we can develop a great relationship with you, we are not hiding anything from you. We are passionate about what we do and are strict when it comes to moral business ethics, we do not accept commissions from our suppliers. If we are paid a commission that is unavoidable from a hotel or caterer or gain a discount or get a commission we give it back to our clients.

We will offer you a supplier that fits your needs not based on our personal gain and if we can get something extra for you because of our relationship with that supplier then great.

I do hope next time you google wedding planners in Spain this will make you think before you leap and although some planners might seem slightly more expensive, really think about what you want from them rather than opt for the cheap version with the free website thrown in.

I will of course do a blog post on free wedding websites shortly as well but in the meantime just check out Google Weddings :)

Watercolour Wedding Inspiration

We have been very busy here at Reviva Weddings and are currently designing some wonderful weddings for next year.

There is nothing more refreshing than working with creative brides and I have one in particular who is completely amazing and is actually making me quite jealous!

She is a breath of fresh air and really thinking outside the box, a challenge that I love.

So we sit here, ponder, drum fingernails on tables, watch sunrises and sunsets, contemplate, study fashions and create styles, designs, and inspirations for our up and coming weddings.

I do love this time of year, we get a chance to put our creative hats back on, drink copious amounts of tea and take stock of what we have achieved and how we can improve our service to our clients, plus of course get hugely creative and plan and scheme for next year!

Currently we are creating wedding designs based on watercolour paintings which I am really enjoying, so thought I would start to share some with you as we dream about spring and summer weddings.

Here we have created a mood board based around a painting by Pol Ledent from Belgium. The colours are fun and vibrant using a purple and yellow colour combo, hugely popular on the colour wheel when you are a design student! This is a modern wedding design, throwing out any convention and could be turned into quite a retro, quirky day if we had a brave bride!

We will be sharing more of our watercolour wedding inspirations with you over the next few weeks until Christmas takes over so keep checking back for some fabulous ideas.

We are also working on some very glittery guest blog posts so do watch this space!

Happy Halloween!

Wishing our followers a Happy Halloween weekend and hope you all have a wonderful ghoulish, spooky time!
We thought we would share some lovely images found on Pinterest with you!

We are featured on Preston Bailey´s brides blog!

I am a huge fan of Preston Bailey and his extraordinary fairytale events he creates.

Preston Bailey is every event designer´s aspiration, to think outside the box and create sublime decoration experiences using lighting, props and of course gorgeous florals.

Every day I avidly follow the Preston Bailey blog, which recently has become a brilliant tool offering advice, business insights and of course inspirations.

Can you imagine my delight when scanning Facebook last night I realised my blog was featured on his yesterday, I nearly fell off my chair and was almost hyperventilating :)

I just had to share this with you and then will get back to work!

Moroccan Style Pumpkins for Halloween

As Halloween approaches I thought I would share this photo I found tonight on pinterest of decorated pumpkins Moroccan style, a style that is close to my heart as we use it a lot for our wedding styling.

I am sticking with glittery pumpkins but if any of you are feeling adventurous this idea looks amazing, however, I am sure if I created a pumpkin masterpiece like this I would not want to be turning it into pumpkin soup or pie!

Glitter :)

I don´t think any girl can have enough glittery things.

For me it brings many lovely memories and I was delighted to find these fabulous glittery photos to share with you in Pinterest.

If you are girly and crafty like me then I hope you enjoy!

I am thinking tonight though with the beautiful sunlight we get here in Spain some glitter would not go amiss in our weddings next year, a bit of twinkle is always pretty and not necessarily reserved for Christmas so my brain is ticking away!

I have also earnt the lovely title of the Fairy Godmother of the Costa Del Sol, so perhaps some waving of the glitter wand might be forthcoming, but for now I will share these gorgeous photos with you and I will get back to my pumpkins, which you never know may even turn into carriages! :)

Design Finds

I have finally worked out how pinterest works, so now of course another time consuming past time and am in heaven :) I have two likes already and still not entirely sure how this works but only loaded up a few photos tonight!

It has been a strange week for me, my beloved father is in hospital and I have been on a bit of a standby really, just doing hospital visits, worrying about him and my mother and generally trying to be useful but finding it hard to concentrate and not really knowing how to pass the odd few hours.

So, what does a girl do when under this sort of predicament, I have been just clearing clutter that has built up over the summer and filling my mind with ideas for decorating and design, which of course is therapeutic in itself. When I spoke to my sister in London earlier, she was doing exactly the same thing!

I have a certain design style I love but of course I cannot stamp my personal taste onto my weddings or interiors, I have to make sure I translate what the client wants, whether I like it or not!

Some of my posts are not directly wedding related but they are researching design, colour, balance and style, all commodities that are applied to our wedding design.

You would be amazed what images are stored in the back of my head somewhere and are hauled back out when I meet with a client that has their own vision.

I love these images I found this evening on a fabulous design blog.

More inspiration for my decluttering and decoration plans and of course perhaps for a future wedding.

Pimp my Van!

Sorted :)!

Sharing a Few Inspirations

Top 2 Images Selina Lake Bottom 2 Images by Rebecca Newport via Lobster & Swan

We have had a fabulous time over the summer creating our beautiful weddings and now it is time for me to recharge, relax and look forward to some down time.

What should be an idyllic life in my little white washed townhouse set in a village in the mountain overlooking Marbella is indeed slightly chaotic, to say the least! I have been told today, on three occasions, that I should write a book, but that will be work in progress!

I have a few blogs I follow, well actually quite a few, but in the summer I don´t get time as we are so busy but now, in the autumn, I recharge the design batteries and love spending time looking at these hugely talented stylists work.

At the moment I am searching for inspiration for decorating a few bedrooms as it is this time of year I start reorganising, clearing clutter and creating lovely spaces.

I have to admit today I have been slightly thrown off my path for personal reasons but I know by absorbing these beautiful images and inspirations that some fabulous bedrooms will be forthcoming and I also noted that all these images have Christmas baubles in them which is perhaps telling me something?!

Perhaps tomorrow I will be digging out my Nigella and Delia cookbooks!