Hampton Court House

The shell grotto is the spot we’d walk you to at Hampton Court House. It’s encrusted floor to ceiling, small enough that the two of you fill the frame, and completely unlike the rest of this London garden, so it breaks up your portraits in a single stop. The rooms handle very different jobs. A bay-window room hung with a tapestry takes the mandap and holds enough daylight for a long ceremony without us lighting any of it, there’s a domed yellow room for a civil ceremony, a panelled library for hair and makeup in between, and a columned hall with a grand piano in it. Two carved staircases, one barley-twist and one black, both worth stopping on. Outside there’s clipped topiary, hydrangeas and lawn right on the edge of the parkland, which gives you an easy loop to walk between courses. Dinner and dancing go in the conservatory, glazed overhead and strung with fairy lights, bright all afternoon and glowing out into the garden after dark.