Danesfield House Hotel and Spa – a wedding photographer’s review

Danesfield House wedding photography – a venue review by professional wedding photographer Robert Hooper

The Danesfield House Hotel & Spa is located at Marlow-on-Thames in Buckinghamshire, set within 65 acres of estate grounds in the beautiful Chiltern Hills overlooking the River Thames. With easy access to the M25, M4 and M40 motorways, the venue is around 45 minutes from central London or 35 minutes from Heathrow airport. Several rooms (The Versailles, Chiltern and Henley Suites, and more recently the long ornate restaurant formerly known as the Oak room) are licensed for civil wedding ceremonies – though if you prefer a church wedding you can also choose to hold this elsewhere and use the house as your reception venue alone for up to around 100 guests – and with 84 rooms available including 11 suites, your family and friends can also choose to stay overnight to enjoy the celebrations in style if they wish.

The interiors have a lush, opulent feel to them, with plenty of warm dark wooden panels and ornate furnishings to match. Photography-wise, there are plenty of photo opportunities both inside the house and outside in the grounds if the weather is kind – the gardens are ideal for some relaxed bride and groom photos and a short walk around the house reveals several different spots that can be utilised by a creative wedding photographer to get some really unique wedding photos for your album. Below, we see our bride and groom having some fun ‘together time’ below the crest set into the main archway leading to the hotel entrance.

Back inside, guests can enjoy drinks and canapes in the Grand Hall – a very civilised venue for your wedding reception as seen below, complete with fireplace, dark wood panelling, chandeliers and even tapestries adorning the walls…

Once you move into the restaurant for your wedding breakfast (see first photo) you’ll discover that this is unusually long with three superb chandeliers running the length of the room and windows along one side giving plenty of daylight. From a photographer’s perspective, the long thin shape needs careful consideration in terms of both having good access to photograph all your guests (tables are set out with plenty of room between them but your photographer will need to traverse the room a few times during speeches in order to give full photographic coverage) and also in terms of lighting once the daylight fades: a single light or two at one end of this room is certainly not going to light the entire area so you’ll need a good lighting plan to cover the whole room as and when needed. We’ve found that high quality multiple flashes triggered by discreet radio signals are ideal for this type of scenario – but not all photographers carry this equipment – so be warned!

Plenty of variety when looking for surfaces to shoot details like these wedding rings – and also plenty of variety for some more unusual shots of the bride and groom for that matter, too…

 

…and at the end of the day when the dancing begins and it’s time for your photographer to leave there’s always one more shot we can take on the way home – the drive leading up to Danesfield House looks stunning at night!

All in all, Danesfield House offers a good deal of features and variety to ensure that your wedding day – and your wedding photos – go very smoothly. With good access for guests who needing to travel and plenty of accommodation on-site this is a lovely wedding venue with a lot going for it. Photography-wise we have plenty of variety both indoors and out, which should be enough to keep your photographer happy. Worth a visit!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this review of Danesfield House, and enjoyed looking at the wedding photos I’ve used to illustrate it. If you’d like us to photograph your wedding at Danesfield House, please contact us directly.

Rob.

Buckinghamshire wedding photography at Danesfield House Hotel and Spa