Lakhita & Satnaam's Marquee Wedding at Pennyhill Park

A marquee is the most honest venue there is. No architecture to lean on, no chandeliers already doing half the work: white walls, a white ceiling, and whatever you bring. Mahood Marquees put the structure up on the lawns and Silver Fox Events, who we work for as a preferred supplier, dressed it: round tables in white chiavari chairs with purple florals on every one and a floral installation hung over the floor, while Food Link UK fed five hundred out of the back. Our job was the colour. We ran two looks through the night, a purple that made the draping glow for dinner and a blue that pulled everything toward the floor, and moved between them as the evening did.

The band came over from Canada for the night, and a mehfil in a marquee is a sound job before it is anything else. Five hundred people in a tent with no walls to hold the low end, and a band that wants to be heard clearly rather than loudly. So the PA went in for them first, tuned for voices and the tabla, and DJ H played on the same system after the handover rather than on a rig of his own. One system, one set of levels, no lurch in volume when the band stood up and the DJ sat down. That handover is the moment most marquee nights lose ten minutes and a floor. This one did not.

Once the band had finished and the floor was DJ H's, the lighting stopped being decor. Beams across the room, moving lights over the floor and the mirror underneath sending it all back, and the florals overhead taking whatever colour the room was in. For the last stretch we ran it deep red, which is the colour we reach for when a floor is full and nobody is leaving. The photographs of that hour are the ones with no empty space in them. Every photograph on this page is our own, taken by our team on the night.