Joyful Pink & Orange Disco Wedding in the Forest

Be prepared to be blown away by the show-stopping nuptials of WWW readers Anthony and Rosalind. Their pink and orange disco wedding was all kinds of gorgeous. And did I mention it was held in the heart of the forest?!

There is SO much to love about their day, yes the styling, outfits, flowers and decor. But also the sentiment, ethos and love behind their planning. From their decision to get married to the delicious cuisine, meditation on the dancefloor and the thoughtful touches, it was all so special and inspiring.

I will leave you to enjoy their wedding report in full, alongside the tremendous captures by Lisa and Neil Wedding Photography. Thanks so much to Lisa and Neil for sharing their fantastic images with us.

Pink & Orange Disco Wedding

The Proposal

We make all our big life decisions together, so there’s no proposal story really! Once we had made the decision to get married, we went together to Zelley’s in Norwich and bought a beautiful antique sapphire and diamond engagement ring from 1892, paying half each.

We had our legal wedding ceremony at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery on Saturday 4 September 2022, with just our immediate family in attendance.

The Vision

Because we were already legally married, the vision for our wedding day was to celebrate our love and life with each other.

We wanted a relaxed vibe, full of joy and personal touches and away from the more formal wedding traditions. We love hosting people so having lots of delicious food, drinks, and things for our guests to do was important to us. All our guests were invited for the full day and evening celebrations. We wanted a venue bursting with the beauty of the natural world, and finally we wanted a bit of disco and sparkle!

The Venue

Our venue was Happy Valley in West Norfolk. We still pinch ourselves that we had our wedding celebration there! From the moment we visited we knew that it was a deeply special place. It is full of the most incredible trees, that creak gently in the wind. The venue has so much to offer but honestly it was those magical trees that sealed the deal for us!

A wedding is a rare moment in time where most of your beloved friends and family are in one place, so having a venue that we could hire for 3 days and stay onsite with our wedding party was a key requirement for us. This meant that on the night before our wedding we could have a BBQ on-site with our closest friends and family. Having that extra quality time with the people we love most in the world is a privilege we will never forget!

Happy Valley is a dry-hire venue, which was essential to us. Having the freedom to choose our suppliers ourselves and create a completely bespoke wedding day was important to us.

The Ceremony & Music

Because we were already legally married, we had free reign over our ceremony! We asked our dear friend Ed to be our celebrant and the three of us wrote the service together (we had to take out some of the sillier jokes from our first draft). We wanted the ceremony to be short and sweet, and stuffed with our personalities.

Our ceremony was held in a clearing amongst the trees, and it really felt like the forest was watching over proceedings. Rosalind walked down the aisle to Northern Sky by Nick Drake, along with four little flower girls and four bridal folk. Just as we got to the top of the aisle… the Blue Angels flew over the venue! We couldn’t have accidentally timed it any better. I think everyone was a bit stunned to be honest!

During the ceremony we passed our wedding rings around all the guests, asking them to each hold them for a moment and imbue them with luck and love. We exchanged simple vows, thanking each other for our life together so far, expressing gratitude for being in the moment together, and making promises for adventures yet to come.

We had two readings, Freya (Rosalind’s sister) read ‘Love’ from Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Will (Ant’s friend from school) read ‘A supermarket love story’ by John Osborne.

Our DJ was Earl Harlem, who specialises in vintage music and props. He doesn’t usually DJ for weddings, so we were very lucky to work with him. Our first dance was to It’s Been A Long Long Time by Harry James & His Orchestra, a subtle nerdy nod to our love of all things Marvel.

We then had a ‘decades disco’ starting with music from the 1940s and moving through the best music for dancing from each decade chronologically, ending with the best disco music from all eras (with emphasis on the 90s and early 00s as that’s our era!).

Your Outfits

Anthony wore a blue Hugo Boss suit and white trainers. Freya (Rosalind’s sister) handmade him a pocket square and bow tie in a floral Liberty print fabric that matched the colour scheme of pink, orange and green. Anthony wore personalised braces with our initials on, which he also bought for all his groom’s people.

Our grooms people wore their own navy blue suits and trainers, along with their braces and Liberty print bow ties from Etsy.

I wore a pink dress from Needle & Thread, with yellow Esska shoes and a yellow floral headpiece by Pin Up Curl. I love bright colours! A big white wedding dress was never for me. I originally thought I’d wear a folk-style white dress with floral embroidery from O Pioneers, but I had this nagging feeling that it wasn’t quite right for the day we had planned.

The idea of wearing pink was sitting in the back of my mind and then I saw influencer Charlotte Jacklin wearing a pink Needle & Thread gown on Instagram. A quick look through their website and my pink wedding dress was arriving a few days later. Plus I still have the O Pioneers dress to wear in the summer.

I love a bit of sparkle and wanted an outfit change for the evening party. I have long admired the glorious sequined outfits by Rosa Bloom but they were often out of stock… so I signed up for the waiting list for a playsuit. As soon as they came back in stock I ordered one. I think I actually squealed when it was delivered to me. It was so much fun changing my outfit for the evening and I even got a round of applause when I walked back into the barn! I wore the Mella Sequin Cape Jumpsuit in Opal, paired with my trusty pink high-top Converse trainers.

The bridal folk all wore outfits that they had chosen from the colour scheme of orange and pink. I wanted them to wear whatever they felt comfortable and happy in!

Flamingo Amy did the bridal party hair, andIt’s Been A Long Long Time we had the time of our lives spending time with her on the wedding morning. We bonded over a shared love of vintage hairstyles, gherkins and hedgehogs. Amy put us all at ease and I will forever be in awe of how she styled my hair. The bridal folk all opted to have their hair up, and their hair was immaculate to the very end of the night. Amy is magic!

The Styling & Decor

Happy Valley is such a beautiful venue, that everything we did was just value added! We worked with the best suppliers ever who brought our vision to life.

We worked with Daisy from Smoke & Wildwood to style the venue. We booked their creative wedding package in collaboration with QUIRK Lighting and Array Wedding & Event Hire. Daisy instantly understood the vibe we wanted for our wedding and her excitement for making it a reality was contagious. She took our bold colour scheme and made it classy and cool. No detail was too small or too big. We also asked her for as many disco balls as possible, and I’m pretty sure we had every disco ball in Norfolk on site that day!

Our flowers and floral arrangements were put together by Floral Sistas. I think I gasped when I first saw them all set up, and when I look back at the photos I can’t believe they were really our flowers. The team was a dream to work with and truly worked magic with each bloom.

Our wedding stationery was designed by our dear friend Maddy Iszchak. She designed our invitations, menus, place names, a map of the venue, schedule for the day and most excitingly – our ceremony programme. We love the theatre, and our ceremony programme was designed to look like a Broadway Playbill!

Anthony and I are both book lovers, and as wedding favours, we gifted each guest a second-hand book. It was no mean feat sourcing a hundred and twenty books for all our guests, but it was a real labour of love, thinking about the person and finding the perfect book for them. Most of the books came from charity shops, so each gift also represented a donation to those charities. Many guests have messaged us since the wedding to say they have loved reading their gifted book!

We hired an array of yard games from Samphire Vintage Props, and it was so magical to see guests come together to play them. People who had never met before were uniting over hook-a-duck!

In the evening we had a glitter bar by Love Moi Glitter. They use biodegradable eco glitter. This was a huge hit with our guests! It was so much fun seeing everyone with their different glitter colours and designs on their faces! One friend even got a full glitter beard.

One of the most magical touches on our day was a live event painter, Stephanie Struth. In 2016 we went to a wedding in New Orleans that had a live event painter, and it was the most mind-blowing thing to witness, to see a snapshot of the day immortalised in paint. Stephanie captured our favourite vista at Happy Valley, with us at the centre of it, and our immediate family all also appear in the painting. It hangs in our house now and we will treasure it forever. Stephanie was a dream to work with and we were so honoured to have her paint our wedding!

We bought an audio guest book from My Audio Moments, which is essentially a vintage-style phone that guests pick up, record their message, and then put down. After the wedding, we downloaded the audio files and had the best time listening to them all.

We also had a DIY polaroid photo guest book, using our own polaroid camera and essentially leaving out lots of packets of film, sharpies and glue sticks!

Food & Drink

Food, drink and hospitality are really important to us, and again we really lucked out with our suppliers. We are both vegetarian and we wanted all our wedding food to be veggie to reflect this.

Gold Leaf Catering were our main caterers. On the Friday night they cooked up a vegetarian BBQ for our closest friends and family. On the wedding day, they provided canapes and for our main meal, the most delicious Italian-inspired sharing feast followed by bite-sized desserts. The act of sharing food is sacred, and looking around the dining tables and seeing our loved ones sharing salads, bread and risotto between them was magic.

The Cattle Yard at Happy Valley provided a comprehensive drinks package. We offered our guests a welcome drink of Pimms or elderflower fizz, post-ceremony fizz, signature cocktails (Moscow Mule & Spiced Rum Punch), wine with dinner, and then an open bar for the rest of the night. I’m told that margaritas were very popular later in the day!

Immediately after the ceremony, we had canapes, cocktails, ice cream and coffee on offer for our guests. The ice cream was provided by Ronaldo’s and the coffee by Green Wave Coffee Company. Everyone milled around in the sunshine playing games, having refreshments, exploring the venue, and chatting to each other.

Later in the day, and whilst the disco was in full swing, we had our all-time favourite food… pizza! Luca Pizza provided the pizza and gave us all the leftover pizza to take back to our cabin for the after-party, dreamy. We ate Luca Pizza to celebrate getting engaged, so it was a full-circle moment having them at our wedding.

We didn’t have a wedding cake, but we did have lots of cake! Our favourite cake is from Cafe 33 in Norwich, so we bought six cakes of varying flavours and brought them with us to the venue. Delicious!

Your Photographer & Filmmaker

Our photographers were Lisa and Neil. We loved them from the first time we chatted to them. We appreciated their honesty, expertise and sense of humour. It felt like having two friends on our team!

They completely understood our wish for a relaxed day with mostly candid photos. Their excitement and enthusiasm for particular elements of a wedding (confetti!) was infectious. We love our wedding photos so much and are forever grateful we found them to capture our day.

The Honeymoon

We were due to go to Rhodes on a mini-moon…but the wildfires were blazing when we were due to go. We cancelled at the last minute and decided to go to Edinburgh instead, the city where we had our first date!

It was honestly perfect and we can’t imagine any other way we would have mini-mooned. We are hoping to go to Japan in Autumn 2024.

Memorable Moments

Getting ready in the morning with our friends.
The accidental Blue Angels flyover.
Looking round at everyone during dinner and feeling the most overwhelming love for our friends and family.
Ant giving a surprise speech full of loving anecdotes about Rosalind from her friends and family.
The dancing! So many brilliant dancing moments, but the best one came at the very end of the night when it was just our closest friends left. After the final song had played, our DJ put on some relaxing meditation music so it wouldn’t go from disco to silence. But the entire group decided to lie on the floor together and have a final moment of gratitude and awe together. We will never ever forget that moment! The venue had never seen anything like it.
Seeing Stephanie’s painting come together.
Doing a photoshoot with Lisa and Neil in the forest!

Advice For Other Couples

Figure out what your wedding deal-breakers are (ie. accommodation on site, vegetarian food, dry hire venue).
Trust your suppliers and listen to every kernel of advice they have to offer! They do this over and over again and have so much wisdom.
That said, communicate with your suppliers and tell them what you want. And be honest about what you want.
Dispense with the traditions that you don’t feel strongly about.
Don’t skimp on food and drink. Look after your guests as if they were in your own home.
Relax! Once the day has started there’s not much else you can do, so you might as well go with the flow and enjoy it.
Don’t be afraid to delegate tasks.
A beautiful thing is never perfect, and nothing ever goes 100% to plan. Enjoy the day that unfolds in front of you, don’t compare it to a fictional day in your head!