A Heritage Grand Perast Wedding in the Bay of Kotor — Jenna & Mark

Venue: Heritage Grand Perast, Perast, Bay of Kotor, Montenegro

Guests: 32, including the couple

Date: 28 June 2026

Couple from: United Kingdom

Format: ceremony at the Piazza square · reception drinks on the square · dinner on the Panoramic terrace

Our role: design, décor and florals · furniture, linen, lighting and equipment from our own warehouses · vendor sourcing · timeline support · two coordinators on the day

Opening

Perast is one long stone street between the mountain and the water, and Heritage Grand sits in the middle of it, in a restored 18th-century palace. Jenna and Mark chose to marry outside, in the piazza, in front of the old church façade — and then to sit every one of their guests at a single table.

That decision is the reason this wedding looks the way it does.

One table, not eight

Jenna sent us a picture of what she wanted: a serpentine layout — round tables set in an offset row so the whole party reads as one continuous, curving table rather than a grid of separate ones. Her words for why were better than ours: intimate without being formal and starchy.

She asked for seven tables. We came back and said six.

That isn't cost-cutting, it's arithmetic. A serpentine table seats differently from a standalone round: four along the outer curve, two or three on the shorter inner side, because the overlap eats the places where a chair would otherwise go. Six of ours seated her group comfortably. Seven would have stretched the curve past the point where the two ends of the table can still feel like one room.

The linen mattered more than usual here, and for a reason you can see rather than read. Heritage Grand has its own tablecloths, but they don't fall to the ground. On a normal rectangular plan nobody notices. On a serpentine table photographed from above — which is the only angle that shows the shape at all — table legs and chair frames break the line completely. So the linen came from our warehouses: floor-length, white, running the whole curve unbroken.

Look at the overhead photograph. That clean white ribbon across the terracotta stone is the whole point of choosing this shape, and it only exists because the cloth reaches the floor.

Blue and white against old stone

The palette was Jenna's: light blues and white, nothing else.

That's a harder brief in Perast than it sounds, because the backdrop is already doing a great deal — carved stone, a Venetian lion above the door, weathered green shutters, potted citrus and cypress along the wall. Anything built too tall or too solid ends up arguing with an 18th-century façade and losing.

So there was no arch. Jenna's own instinct was right: just something either side of where we will stand. We set two large arrangements in urns on white plinths, flanking the church steps — white roses, blue hydrangea, delphinium, gypsophila — so the frame around the couple was the building itself, and the flowers simply marked the spot.

Down the table, the same palette in a different register: small vessels of whites and light blues threaded along the centre with candles between them, and a blue cheesecloth runner beneath the centrepieces. Bouquets in short-stemmed white roses for the bride and four bridesmaids, buttonholes in white rose, eucalyptus and ribbon.

Festoon lighting overhead for when the square went dark.

The chairs, and why they only got carried once

Mark asked for one thing that sounds small and isn't: the same chairs at the ceremony as at dinner. Three across in the front rows, for the bridesmaids on one side and their children on the other, then four across behind.

Two sets of chairs is the easy answer and the wrong one. It means a visible change of language halfway through the evening, and it means double charge. One set means every chair has to be counted twice — once against the ceremony rows, once against six curving tables — and then physically moved in the ninety minutes while the guests are on the square with a drink and the couple are away being photographed.

That's the kind of thing that either happens invisibly or ruins an hour. It happened invisibly.

The day

Guests came down to the square at five for arrival drinks. The ceremony was at half past five, in front of the church. Reception drinks straight afterwards on the piazza while the two of them went off for photographs along the waterfront.

Guests were called to sit at quarter past seven, seated by half past, and the couple came in at 7:32 — Mark's own timing, written exactly like that. A short speech from him, deliberately short. Dinner from a quarter to eight. Dessert, then the first dance, then pizza at ten, which is the correct way to end a wedding and we will not be taking questions.

Two of our coordinators were on site from the morning preparations through to the first dance.

The day before, two guests found they couldn't travel. Every setting on a serpentine table is positioned relative to the ones beside it, so the plan was reworked that evening rather than adjusted on the morning.

The team

Venue: Heritage Grand Perast

Hair & Makeup: Olga Pronkina

DJ: DJ Geller

Photographer: Boban Vulevic Wedd

Design, décor, florals, inventory, production and day-of coordination: ESBI Weddings & Events

Closing

Planning a wedding at a hotel in the Bay of Kotor? Most venues here will host you beautifully and leave the design, the décor and the setup to you. That part is ours — designed, made and delivered by one team.