Delapré Abbey

Book a winter date at Delapre Abbey and you get the version of it we like best. You marry in the library of the Northamptonshire house, walled in with books and one big arched window down the side, and in December there’s a tree in the corner and candles on the sills, so the ceremony frames come out warm and lamplit rather than cold. Everything else is a few steps away: panelled rooms with marble fireplaces, chandeliers, a piano, a long table by the fire for dinner, so we can keep moving you and nothing looks like it was all shot in one room. The walled garden is where the portraits happen, brick walls and gravel paths and clipped yews that hold their shape when nothing is in leaf, with sides high enough to keep the wind off you. Confetti goes under the arched stone porch, which is sheltered. Give us two minutes after dark and we’ll put you back in that porch with the lanterns lit, because by then the weather has no say in your day at all.