When the View Is the Decor: Weddings on the Hudson and the Sound

The best rooms in this county are on water. The river side: Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Irvington, Croton, with the Palisades across the way going rust in October. The Sound side: Rye, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, New Rochelle, with boats and a lawn that runs to the seawall. Couples book these rooms for the window. Then they hire people to fill the room with things, and half of what the wedding decorators Westchester couples hire will actually do in a place like that is talk them out of it. The decor’s job in a river room is different. Not to make the room. To frame the thing that’s already making it, and stay out of the way.

Nothing in front of the window

That’s rule one and most of the rest follow from it. An arch set against a west-facing river window at five o’clock turns the couple into two dark shapes in a bright rectangle, and no flower fixes backlight. So the ceremony turns. The water goes to the side, where it shows up in every wide shot without being behind anyone’s head, or the arch gets replaced by two grounded pieces low enough to leave the horizon clear above them. The seating chart never goes in the window either; a mirror facing the water reflects the water, and nobody finds table six in a sunset. The welcome sign stays inside by the door rather than out on the terrace where it’s competing with a river and losing. And the tables all face the view, or at least none of them turn their backs on it. The sweetheart table goes at the window’s edge, angled, so the couple can see out and the photographer can see them.

Two kinds of light

The river faces west. The Sound faces south and east. That’s two completely different design problems, and I’ve watched decorators treat them the same and regret it.

A Hudson room gets about twenty minutes of gold when the sun drops behind the Palisades, then five minutes of blinding, then dark. Plan around the twenty. Toasts in the gold if the timeline allows, candles already lit before it goes, and no acrylic or mirror anywhere near the glass or the whole room squints. A Sound room never gets that glare. Its evening light is soft and blue and a little cool, and it can make a room feel chilly by eight, so the flowers run warm, peach and cream and coral, and the uplights run amber to put the color back.

The palette comes from outside

I don’t bring a palette to a water venue. I take one from the window. The river is gray-green with a lot of sky, so white and green and blue-gray sit right, and in fall the rust from the cliffs comes indoors as dahlias and copper ribbon. The Sound is blue water, white hulls, green lawn: navy and white, coral, the classic club look that’s classic because it’s what’s outside. Hot pink against a gray river in April fights the view and the view wins. Whatever’s happening past the glass, the tables should look like they belong to the same afternoon.

The terrace is the ceremony

Most water venues put the vows on the lawn or the terrace facing the water, and the backdrop is the water, which means the backdrop is free and the wind is not. The Sound always has wind. The river has it about half the time. So ceremony pieces are grounded, weighted, and low. No tall arch on a single frame, no shepherd hooks with arrangements swinging off them, no petals, since petals on a seawall in Rye are in the water before the flower girl reaches the front. Two big urns and nothing overhead. Or a low asymmetrical piece on one side that leaves the other side open to the view. On a lawn in Croton with the river behind it, that’s the whole ceremony design, and it’s plenty.

When the weather takes the view

Fog. Rain. A flat gray March afternoon with nothing past the glass but more gray. It happens, and a room designed entirely around a window has nothing left when the window goes blank. So the decor has to be able to hold the room alone. Candles in real quantity. A few tall pieces near the glass, so the eye has something to land on where the view was. Amber uplights along the window wall. Draping that frames the glass rather than covers it, so when the fog lifts at seven, and it often does, the view walks back into a room that was already dressed. The rain plan at a water venue isn’t a second room. It’s a lighting plan.

Small things about water

Salt air on the Sound dries flowers faster than you’d think, so terrace pieces get watered twice and misted before guests arrive. Humidity off the river does the opposite and wilts anything soft by cocktail hour in August. Bugs come out at dusk on both, and lanterns are decor while citronella is not, so every candle outdoors goes in a hurricane, which handles the wind too. Boats go by, which is charming. And on the river side there’s a Metro-North train every twenty minutes, and one of them will sound its horn during the vows. Decor can’t fix that. I mention it so nobody blames the florist.

Knowing when to stop

Every decorator wants to fill a room, and in a room like this the skill is not doing it. Two urns, the horizon, candles for when the light goes, a palette borrowed from the window. A wedding on the water in Larchmont or Tarrytown doesn’t need to be decorated so much as edited, and the couples who end up happiest are the ones who let the river or the Sound do most of the work and paid for the rest.