Dry Hire Wedding Planner in the Cotswolds.
You've found a venue that took your breath away. A walled garden. A private estate. A converted barn or a stretch of Cotswolds countryside with nothing in it but potential.
Now comes the part nobody quite prepares you for.
A dry hire venue gives you total creative freedom — and total planning responsibility. There's no in-house catering team, no preferred marquee supplier, no venue coordinator to lean on. Every element of your wedding — the infrastructure, the suppliers, the logistics, the contingencies — is yours to organise from scratch.
That's not a problem. It's actually an opportunity to create something genuinely extraordinary. But it requires a very different kind of wedding planner.
What Is a Dry Hire Wedding Venue?
A dry hire venue — sometimes called a blank canvas venue — is a space hired without catering, staffing, or in-house wedding services. You rent the location. Everything else, you bring.
This is different from a traditional wedding venue, which typically includes:
An in-house catering team or approved caterers list
Tables, chairs, and linen
A venue coordinator who manages the day
Structured packages with defined guest numbers and timings
At a dry hire or exclusive-use venue, none of that is given. Instead, you're starting with a beautiful empty space and building a wedding around it — which means sourcing and coordinating every single supplier yourself, from the marquee company and the generator hire to the portable loos and the licensed bar.
For couples who want a wedding that looks and feels entirely their own — not a version of someone else's package — dry hire is transformative. But the planning complexity is significant, and getting it wrong isn't an option on a day that happens exactly once.
Why Dry Hire Weddings Require a Specialist Planner.
This is the part that surprises most couples.
Many wedding planners are brilliant at what they do — and completely out of their depth at a dry hire venue. That's not a criticism. It's simply the reality that planning a wedding at a traditional venue and planning one at a blank canvas site are fundamentally different disciplines.
Here's what a dry hire wedding typically requires that a traditional venue wedding does not:
Infrastructure planning from scratch. At a dry hire venue, you are responsible for the physical infrastructure of your wedding. That means sourcing a marquee or structure, arranging power (often via generator), organising water supply if needed, arranging waste disposal, and ensuring the site can physically accommodate every supplier's vehicle and equipment. These are not small decisions. A generator that's too small, a marquee company that hasn't worked your site before, or a catering team that arrives to find no suitable power supply — any of these can unravel a day.
Full supplier coordination. A traditional venue has relationships with approved suppliers who know the space. At a dry hire venue, you are bringing together an entirely bespoke team — often 12 to 20 separate suppliers — many of whom have never worked together before and some of whom have never been to your site. Coordinating access, timings, deliveries, setups and breakdowns across that many moving parts requires experience, authority, and meticulous planning.
Licensing and legal compliance. Dry hire venues often require you to arrange your own Temporary Events Notice (TEN) for the sale of alcohol, liaise with environmental health about catering arrangements, and ensure your event complies with noise and planning conditions specific to that site. Miss one of these and your event may not be able to proceed.
Site-specific knowledge. Every blank canvas venue has its quirks. The access road that can't take an articulated lorry. The area of the garden that floods in wet weather. The acoustic profile that makes a band sound extraordinary from one position and muddy from another. This knowledge doesn't come from a venue brochure. It comes from having worked the site, walked it in every season, and built relationships with the people who manage it.
Why I'm the Right Planner for Your Dry Hire Wedding
I am a specialist. Not a generalist who occasionally takes dry hire bookings — a planner who has built an entire practice around exclusive-use and blank canvas venues in the Cotswolds, because I believe it's the most creatively rewarding and logistically demanding work in wedding planning.
Before I became a wedding planner, I spent my career at the world's largest advertising agency, producing major television campaigns and high-profile live events. That background shaped everything about how I work.
A television production and a dry hire wedding have more in common than you might think. Both are live. Both happen once. Both involve coordinating large, complex teams under significant time pressure — where the failure of one element affects everything else. Both demand a director's creative vision and a producer's operational precision.
I bring both.
What that means for your wedding:
I know the venues. I work with a carefully selected number of Cotswolds exclusive-use and dry hire spaces — including Kiftsgate Court Gardens and Batsford Arboretum — and I know them properly. Not from a site visit on a Tuesday morning. From experience: from understanding how they perform on the day, what their limitations are, and how to make them look and feel extraordinary.
I know the suppliers. Years of working exclusively in this niche means I've built a trusted network of Cotswolds wedding suppliers — caterers, marquee companies, florists, lighting designers, AV teams — who know how to work at blank canvas venues and who I'd trust with my own wedding. You won't be handed a generic suppliers list. You'll be introduced to the right people for your site, your style, and your budget.
I work with a small number of couples each year. That's a deliberate choice. Dry hire weddings at luxury venues deserve full attention, deep preparation, and a planner who is genuinely invested in the outcome. I don't run a volume business. I run a craft one.
What a Dry Hire Wedding with Me Looks Like
Every couple and every venue is different, but here's what you can expect when we work together on a dry hire or exclusive-use Cotswolds wedding:
A thorough site assessment — walking the venue together, identifying infrastructure requirements, and building a realistic picture of what your day needs to work.
A fully bespoke supplier team — sourced, briefed, and coordinated by me, with every contract reviewed and every logistics question answered before the day.
A detailed production schedule — not just a running order, but a complete document covering every supplier arrival, every technical requirement, every turnaround and contingency.
Full day management — on the day itself, I'm there from the first delivery to the last dance, running the production so that you can simply be present in it.
Ready to Talk About Your Dry Hire Wedding?
If you're planning a luxury Cotswolds wedding at a dry hire or exclusive-use venue, I'd love to hear about it.
I offer a free initial consultation — a relaxed conversation about your venue, your vision, and whether we're the right fit for each other. No obligation, no pitch. Just a conversation between two people who both want your day to be extraordinary.