Zoe Otedola & Cole Weston's Bucolic English Countryside Wedding
“We had very different views about the size of it,” Zoe Otedola says of her wedding to Cole Weston. “I wanted 50 people. He wanted more than 400!” They eventually reached a compromise and invited 150 guests to celebrate their union over Labor Day weekend last year. “We were very close with every person who came to our wedding,” Zoe says. “It allowed for such an intimate gathering.”
Choosing a destination, on the other hand, was easy. The couple, who met at Harvard Business School and now live in New York, opted for a swath of English countryside less than an hour from London, for reasons both personal (the bride’s mother is from the UK) and practical: It would be easy enough to reach for their guests, who were traveling from Nigeria, Hong Kong, and the U.S.
The itinerary was planned to give their friends a properly bucolic British experience (except in regard to the weather, which was uncharacteristically perfect all weekend). There were leisurely bike rides through picturesque villages and bountiful dinners at Soho Farmhouse. Martinis and cigars were served nightly at the bar of Cliveden House, a 17th-century Grade I–listed home turned Relais & Châteaux property where most guests stayed. The couple held their rehearsal dinner in the hotel’s French Dining Room, a piece of Rococo splendor built by William Waldorf Astor when he moved into Cliveden in the late 1800s. There was an intimate ladies lunch for the bridal party, to which everyone wore a fascinator, and a round of golf for the guys, organized by Cole and his father, at Lambourne Golf Club. All of this was a prelude to the welcome party, at a boathouse gastropub on the Thames, which officially kicked off the celebrations.
Still, everyone had plenty of energy left for the wedding at Hedsor House, which was once the home of Princess Augusta, mother of King George III, and was recently used as a location for The Crown. The newlyweds did their first dance to Etta James’s “A Sunday Kind of Love,” and guests dined on an elegant menu of butternut squash gnocchi and raspberry meringue roulade.
And there were martinis—lots of them, per the couple’s instruction that there be an unlimited supply. “I later learned from our caterers that our group consumed the most martinis at a wedding they had ever seen,” Zoe says. Late night burgers offered invaluable hangover insurance.
The morning after, in lieu of a farewell brunch, Mr. and Mrs. Weston decided to keep the party going by jetting off to St-Tropez with a few of their closest friends. “We definitely had a jam-packed week,” Zoe says, “which was an absolute riot.”
This story appears in the April 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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