Wedding Photographer Château Impney — French Second Empire Chateau in Worcestershire and the Droitwich Setting
Château Impney is the most improbable and the most spectacular of England’s country house wedding venues — a full French Second Empire chateau built between 1873 and 1875 to the design of Auguste Tronquois of Paris by the salt magnate John Corbett as an extraordinary romantic gift for his French wife Anna O’Meara, and sitting on a low Worcestershire hillside with a formal French parterre garden, a pavilion and a lake as artificial evidence of a displaced continental landscape dropped entirely intact into the English Midlands. For Château Impney wedding photography, the building’s mansard roofs, the central tower, the slate-blue zinc rooflines and the stone-faced exterior of the French imperial style provide a portrait backdrop of absolute uniqueness in England.
The Chateau Exterior, the Parterre and the Formal Gardens
The chateau’s north front entrance — the tall central pavilion, the flanking wings and the formal stone steps up to the principal door beneath the heraldic cartouche — provides a portrait setting that is visually unlike any other English country house: the French imperial style’s high mansard roof, the profuse decorative ironwork cresting and the formal symmetry of the north facade create portrait compositions that belong to France’s Loire valley or Ile-de-France rather than England’s midland plain. The formal parterre garden on the south side — the lower terrace with its parterres of box and seasonal planting, the stone balustrade above and the view across the formal garden to the lake below — provides the most thoroughly French formal landscape available at any English wedding venue. The formal geometry of the parterre with the chateau’s south facade above provides a portrait composition of classical formality and exceptional colour.
Droitwich Spa, the Wychavon Countryside and the Malvern Hills
Droitwich Spa — the Worcestershire salt town whose brine springs were exploited since Roman times and whose Victorian spa development under John Corbett produced the ornate Droitwich Brine Baths building and the elegant spa parks — provides immediate context for the chateau’s setting as a product of Victorian industrial wealth seeking cultural respectability through architectural extravagance. The Worcestershire countryside surrounding Droitwich — the hop yards and orchards of the Teme valley to the west, the Vale of Evesham to the south and the Malvern Hills visible from the chateau’s upper floors on clear days — provides portrait extensions of the English pastoral landscape in direct contrast to the chateau’s French continental character. Hanbury Hall (National Trust William and Mary house, twelve miles east) provides an alternative English country house portrait setting for day-after sessions.