Real Wedding at Langverwagt {Elmarie & Jacques}

OMG I am in LOVE with this wedding. Seriously. It’s one of those that got my heart racing with excitement the minute I laid eyes on it! We’re talking beyond gorgeous rustic styling (I just love the dusky palette used), twinkly fairylights, burlap runners, a stunning venue in Langverwagt. Plus, some really original details, like the wooden animals that the bride and groom made for each table instead of using a number (and used as cake toppers as well) and the beautiful stationery. The flowers, the boutonnieres, the groomsmen’s styling. Oh, I could go on forever… The gorgeous photographs were taken by Andre van Niekerk of Vivid Blue, and I just couldn’t make myself cut them down too much, so you have a bumper post today!

From the lovely Elmarie:
Jacques and I met at Oppikoppi (a three day rock festival in Johannesburg). At the time, he was working as a TV presenter in Johannesburg for the music channel MK on DSTV, and I am an art teacher in Cape Town. We instantly fell in love and got engaged after six months of knowing one another. He proposed at a sunset concert in Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town – we went there with a couple of friends and after everyone had left we were strolling down the garden on our way back to the car and he got down on one knee.

Amazingly, we have exactly the same taste in… well, almost everything, so it was easy to choose a theme we both liked. We had a fairy-tale inspired farm-style wedding, with a vintage feel. We made use of a combination of earthy, dusky vintage colours and design elements.
My mother first suggested our wedding venue, Langverwagt, and after our first visit we were absolutely in love with the place! Maybe it was the gravel pathway leading up to the farmhouse, or the enormous English garden surrounding the farm, but all in all it was exactly what we were looking for and we immediately booked it for our wedding date.

We made almost everything ourselves. Jacques is a very talented designer, so we made our own wedding stationery. We also designed and cut out little wooden animals to use as table numbers instead of actual numbers on the tables. We bought little glass tubs, filled them with homemade sweet mustard and decorated them with hessian (burlap), French ribbon and custom-designed name tags as presents for our guests to take home. We also had our names and wedding date printed on silk ribbon as part of the table decorations.

Some of the things I loved: the feeling of love in the atmosphere; the smell of the farm; the wedding band, Manouche, with their gypsy, jazzy sound in the background; the enormous English garden; laughter of friends and family and of course most of all knowing the fact that today I was going to marry the man of my dreams and spend the rest of my life with him.

My advice to other brides is not to worry about the little things, focus on on the reason why you are there to get married to the person you love and want to spend the rest of your life with. Embrace the day and accept all the love and good wishes that come your way.

Thank you SO much for sending us this wedding, Elmarie and Jacques – I hope your lives together will be as beautiful as your big day was. And another big thank you to Andre – you can see more from this wedding on his blog.

You may also like...