Wedding Photographer Chilston Park — Victorian Country House Hotel, the Weald and Leeds Castle
Chilston Park is a Grade II* listed Victorian country house hotel near Lenham in the Kent Weald — a mid-nineteenth century house of considerable decorative extravagance set in parkland above the Weald, whose Antique-filled interiors, the ornamental lake and the formal garden provide a wedding venue of country-house-hotel character with genuine Victorian period quality in its rooms and furnishings. The house’s location in the Kent Weald — between Maidstone to the north and the North Downs above and the Romney Marsh to the south — places it within driving distance of the greatest concentration of great medieval and Tudor manor houses in England. For Chilston Park wedding photography, the Victorian interiors, the parkland and the immediately available Kent landscape of Leeds Castle and Sissinghurst all contribute to an exceptionally rich portrait day.
The Victorian Interiors, the Lake and the Park
Chilston Park’s Victorian interiors — the principal rooms furnished with Antiques collected as part of the house’s operating identity, with oil paintings, mahogany furniture and the formal dining room’s marble fireplace — provide available-light portrait settings of Victorian decorative richness that differ substantially from the spare contempory styling of most modern country house hotels. The ornamental lake in the parkland below the south front provides waterside portrait settings with the woodland surrounding the lake’s margins and the house’s Victorian facade reflected in still water in calm conditions. The formal garden on the house’s east side, with herbaceous borders and the topiary hedge enclosures, provides a sheltered garden portrait space of seasonal colour throughout the spring and summer.
Leeds Castle, Sissinghurst and the Kent Landscape
Leeds Castle — the medieval water castle on two islands in the River Len, eleven miles west of Chilston Park, described by Lord Conway as ‘the loveliest castle in the world’ — provides the most photogenically perfect castle portrait setting in south-east England: the castle’s reflection in the double moat, the barbican and the parkland surrounding the water provide portrait compositions of romantic medieval island-castle character of exceptional quality. Sissinghurst Castle Garden (National Trust, twenty miles south-east) — Vita Sackville-West’s famous garden in the ruined Elizabethan mansion, with the White Garden, the Rose Garden and the tower — provides an alternative session setting of extraordinary formal garden design. The North Downs Way and the Medway valley below provide open chalk escarpment and river portrait settings within short drive.