Wedding Photographer Danesfield House — Edwardian Thames-Side Mansion, Chalk Terrace Gardens and the Chilterns
Danesfield House is an extraordinary Edwardian country house hotel above the Thames between Marlow and Henley — a white chalk-faced mansion of 1901 in an eclectic Jacobethan style, set on a chalk headland above a dramatic horseshoe bend of the Thames below the Chiltern escarpment, whose formal Italian terrace gardens step down from the house toward the Thames cliff edge with the river and the Buckinghamshire meadows below. For Danesfield House wedding photography, the combination of the chalk-white house facade with the Moorish and Baroque interiors, the formal terraced gardens above the Thames and the Chiltern beechwood landscape rolling north-east behind the house provides a photographic range from Art Nouveau interior portraiture to chalk cliff and Thames meander landscapes of considerable drama.
The Terrace Gardens, the Thames Cliff and the Mansion Facade
The terrace gardens at Danesfield descend from the house in a sequence of formal Italian terraces — stone balustrades, formal box parterres, a long herbaceous border and a lily pond — toward the chalk cliff at the garden’s south edge where the Thames is visible 40 metres below the garden wall. The series of descending terraces, each with its own architectural element — the sundial terrace, the balustrade overlooking the lily pool, the lower terrace wall above the cliff — provides a portrait sequence of formal architectural garden perspective whose depth and layering creates naturally composed images. The house’s chalk-white facade — the eclectic baroque towers, the loggia and the formal entrance court — provides a portrait backdrop of considerable Edwardian decorative extravagance that photographs with the warmth of afternoon south-facing light from late spring to late summer.
The Thames Meander, Marlow, Henley and the Chiltern Beechwoods
The Thames below Danesfield House — the broad, deliberately slow upper Thames of the Marlow-Henley reach, with its weirs, houseboats, meadow banks and the Gothic chalk cliffs of Medmenham — is accessible from the house gardens and provides a river portrait setting of the most celebrated English inland waterway character. Marlow — a Georgian market town with Tierney Clark’s suspension bridge (1832), the All Saints’ church spire reflected in the millpond and the weir — is three miles east and provides a refined Thames town portrait setting of great quality. The Chiltern beechwoods above the house — the Hambleden valley, the chalk streams and the hanging woods above Skirmett and Turville — provide an ancient native beechwood landscape portrait setting of profound seasonal quality in both spring new-leaf green and autumn copper-gold.