Wedding Photographer Holland Park — the Japanese Kyoto Garden, the Dutch Garden and West London’s Private Villas
Holland Park is the most privately atmospheric of all the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s parks — a 54-acre estate that was the grounds of the nineteenth-century Holland House before wartime bomb damage; the surviving east wing of the house is now an outdoor opera venue set in the park’s formal gardens. The park’s defining feature for Holland Park wedding photography is the Kyoto Garden — a formal Japanese garden given to London as a gift by Kyoto’s Chamber of Commerce in 1991, complete with a koi-filled waterfall pool, stone lanterns, maple and cherry trees and a Japanese-style footbridge. The adjacent Dutch Garden, the formal bedded terraced borders beneath the ruins of Holland House and the arboretum with its peacocks and ancient fox population make Holland Park the most visually varied and privately characterful park in west London for outdoor portrait photography.
The Kyoto Garden and the Holland House Ruins
The Kyoto Garden’s photographic quality is exceptional and unlike any other London park setting: the maple trees turn brilliant red and gold in October and November, and the spring cherry blossom period in April provides a brief but extraordinary Japanese aesthetic that is entirely different in character from the English parks that surround it. The waterfall and pool at the garden’s end creates a specific quality of garden photography — reflected light from the water, the sound of moving water, the koi beneath the surface — that is available in no other London park. The Holland House ruins — the Jacobean east wing façade preserved against the sky — provides a formal architectural backdrop of considerable Gothic grandeur for ceremony exit confetti photographs and formal couple portraits against historic masonry.
Notting Hill, Kensington and the Holland Park Avenue Villas
The residential streets surrounding Holland Park — the stucco-fronted white terraces of Ladbroke Grove, the painted Victorian townhouses of Pembridge Crescent, the wide Edwardian villas of Holland Park Avenue — provide the most photogenic residential streetscapes in London for editorial couple portraits that require an urban character without a busy commercial high street backdrop. Portobello Road on Saturdays provides the chaotic, colourful market photography that is unique to Notting Hill. Kensington’s Albert Memorial, Hyde Park and the Round Pond at Kensington Gardens are all walkable from Holland Park and provide a progression of formal and informal landscape portrait settings available for comprehensive wedding day coverage across the best of central west London.