The Bride Arrived by Boat for Her English Wedding at Sarsden Lake

Notting Hill was the setting for Ella Harris and Harley Philp’s meet-cute. Harley was working at a restaurant on Ella’s street. She went in one day, saw him, and quickly became their best customer. “It helped that I never got presented with a bill by him, which indicated the feelings were mutual,” she jokes.

Ella, who now runs a luxury travel company called Avenue, had been dating Harley for four years when he proposed on New Year’s Eve. “We were at my mother’s house in the Cotswolds, and I already had my hair in rollers preparing for the party that she was having that evening,” Ella remembers. “Harley had been sent out to get some things for the event and came back hours later empty-handed with some peculiar excuse. I then found it even more strange when he insisted on a lunchtime walk to the pub in the pouring rain.” But Ella begrudgingly agreed, threw on some wellies, and came to terms with the fact that her hair was going to fall. “He was acting very jumpy and was unusually quiet, but I still didn’t suspect anything.” Twenty minutes in, Ella started to lose her cool as she was getting increasingly soaked, so like most women in her situation might, she started to march ahead. “At that point, Harley called out my name, and as I turned around, he knelt down into a deep puddle and produced a ring box.”

Ella always wanted to get married at Sarsden Lake—her grandparents got engaged in the boathouse there in 1955, and her aunt and uncle, Rebekah and Charlie Brooks, got married there in 2009. “We felt like there was no more beautiful place to carry on the tradition,” she says. The reception that followed took place at Fairgreen House, the bride’s family’s neighboring home.

The couple worked closely with event producers My Beautiful City, and they brought to life all of Ella and Harley’s ideas. “It was the first wedding they had done, and I think they only agreed to do it because our visions were really in sync,” Ella explains. “I never wanted a ‘wedding,’ more the most fabulous series of scenes to magnify the mood of the day—romantic, dramatic, and theatrical. Robin Scott-Lawson and his astounding team made the impossible possible.”

Her wedding-day look was a bit harder to manifest. “I had a long journey to get the look I eventually chose and only decided on the dress three weeks before the day,” Ella admits. “But somehow no matter how many crazy and unusual ideas I had, I always ended up back at Vivienne Westwood. Her designs are so timeless. They’re classic structures, and no one knows a woman’s body better than she does.” She accessorized with a pair of diamond earrings on loan from a friend whose family owns a London jeweler called Pragnell.

Harley had a dark burgundy three-piece suit made by good friend Matt Whitley, who also did all of the suits for the 10 ushers. “As it was an afternoon [and] evening event, we asked people to come in cocktail attire,” Ella says. “It was quite a glamorous, colorful group for an English summer wedding!” When it was time for the ceremony, Harley stood underneath a beautiful old rose arbor on the lake while the bride arrived by boat with her father. A string quartet played “No Surprises” by Radiohead in the background. “The ceremony was very personal, and we took a long time making sure it was right,” Ella says. There was a mixture of favorite English hymns, and Ella’s uncles Jared and Jamie Harris read unpublished poems as well as a letter by the bride’s late grandfather Richard Harris. “We were very emotional and overwhelmed to be in that moment alone together and yet to see a sea of so many loving people there to support us,” Ella says. “I really didn’t expect it to hit me that hard during the ceremony, but it did.”

The reception began with drinks and standing starters in the vegetable garden. Catering was by Gioconda Scott, who trained with Francis Mallmann, the Argentine chef famous for his outdoor cooking methods and known for his appearances on Chef’s Table. “While all of the guests had drinks in the garden, the food was cooked around them on frame structures above fire pits,” Ella explains. Fire-roasted rib eye and turbot was served alongside seasonal vegetables in the floral-draped barn belonging to Ella’s aunt and uncle, Amanda and Christopher Brooks.

Following dinner, the bride’s brother Callum Dearden and his friend Orson Fry’s band, Soundtown, performed outside under a tin-roof hay barn. “Harley and I are crazy about them and got up to do the last number with them onstage,” Ella says. “Technically, this was our first dance!” While all of this was happening, the dinner barn was transformed into a party space, complete with a red-lit, mirrored room, 12-foot inflatable mushrooms, and DJs Chloe Caillet and Josh Ludlow suspended above the dance floor—needless to say, the party went full force until 5 a.m.