Highfield Park

The parkland is what we’d walk you out into at Highfield Park. Past the clipped hedges it opens out into meadow, and ten minutes out there at dusk gives you portraits with no building, no fence and nobody else in them, which is rare this close to the front door of a Hampshire venue. The Folly is the other spot, an ivy-draped stone colonnade with steps up to it, and it puts real architecture behind either a portrait or an outdoor ceremony. Inside, you marry in a room with deep bay windows, so the vows and the rings happen on daylight and the flash stays in the bag. Weathered brick garden steps and a bench in the grounds fill in between. The red-brick front and its portico take the whole guest list, and the confetti tunnel runs out onto the lawn. Dinner and the first dance sit under a canopy of fairy lights in the glazed garden-room wing, which glows out across the grass once it’s properly dark.