Wedding Photographer Claridge’s — Art Deco Mayfair, the Ballroom and London’s Grandest Hotel Wedding
Claridge’s is London’s most celebrated hotel for weddings of the highest social distinction — a Mayfair hotel of 1898 on Brook Street whose Art Deco remodelling of 1929-32 under the direction of Basil Ionides and Guy Elwes produced the Entrance Hall, the Foyer and the Ballroom in the most restrained and most elegant Art Deco style ever applied to a London hotel interior. The Ballroom’s silver ceiling, the stepped Art Deco cornice, the wall pilasters and the sprung oak floor, the Foyer’s magnificent marble staircase and the Entrance Hall’s chandelier provide a sequence of interior portrait settings whose quality and whose architectural specificity as Art Deco is not matched at any other London hotel venue. For Claridge’s wedding photography, the challenge and the opportunity is the same: to document the extraordinary architectural quality of the interiors in natural available light without the flash that would destroy their mood.
The Foyer, the Ballroom and the Art Deco Interiors
The Foyer at Claridge’s — the principal public reception space immediately inside the Brook Street entrance, with the marble staircase ascending to the hotel’s upper floors and the double-height space above the central dining tables — provides the most formally distinguished hotel foyer portrait setting in London: the warm Art Deco lighting, the figured marble floors and walls and the studied understatement of the 1929 interior design produce portrait images of specific Claridge’s character that are universally recognised. The Ballroom’s silver and white ceiling — perhaps the finest Art Deco ceiling in London — provides an interior available-light portrait setting whose quality depends on careful positioning relative to the room’s sources of natural and artificial light. The Hungarian Suite and the private dining rooms provide more intimate portrait spaces with original Art Deco furnishings.
Mayfair, Bond Street and the West End Portrait Setting
Claridge’s Brook Street location — in the heart of Mayfair between Bond Street and Davies Street — provides immediate access to the finest luxury retail and architectural streetscape in London for exterior portrait sessions: the Old Bond Street’s Georgian shopfronts and the Royal Arcade’s Victorian ironwork provide exterior portrait settings of distinct West End luxury character. The Grosvenor Square garden and the surrounding Mayfair squares — Hanover Square, Grosvenor Square’s Americans War Memorial garden and Berkeley Square’s plane-tree canopy — provide green urban square portrait settings of formal London park character within five minutes’ walk. The Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly (Burlington House’s Palladian courtyard) provides a formal courtyard portrait setting of considerable classical grandeur fifteen minutes’ walk from the hotel.