Outdoor Wedding at Casa Sacoto
Gathering all the important people in your life in a gorgeous Portuguese garden to eat good food, drink good wine and celebrate your love sounds like the perfect wedding plan. This is exactly what Kenny and Yeji wanted their Casa Sacoto wedding to feel like: an intimate gathering with people they loved, where everyone felt happy and cared for.
I first met Kenny and Yeji in person in Lisbon about a year before their wedding, when they were visiting the city and we took the opportunity to do an engagement session. The wedding was still far away but their priorities already seemed in place at that time - they wanted their guests to have an excellent time, and they wanted their time with their guests to be uninterrupted and stress-free; a very easy request for a documentary photographer.
Their chosen venue was Casa Sacoto, a small venue less than an hour away from Lisbon that feels intimate and authentic, with a beautiful garden, a patio, a courtyard, an indoor space that is generally used as the dance floor, and a typical 19-century Portuguese manor house that is gorgeous to the very last detail - all that overlooking the vineyards that cover the fields in in all directions. In short, an idyllic setting.
Kenny and Yeji chose to have their ceremony at the courtyard and used cloth draping all over the space to protect their guests from the direct Summer sun and make the experience more comfortable for everyone. This created an ambient with even lighting that is very rare for Summer ceremonies, so I would always recommend couples to do the same if they're getting married at Casa Sacoto and having their ceremony in their courtyard - the space gets direct sun during the afternoon and can become very bright and hot otherwise.
Kenny and Yeji are both design-oriented and detail-oriented people and had a very clear idea of the type of decoration they wanted for the day: modern, fresh, cheerful, full of pops of colour. The team behind [design studio] executed their vision to perfection alongside Matiz Flowers with flower arrangements that looked like abstract sculptures decorating the dinner tables, the ceremony space and the pool.
Kenny and Yeji didn't want to have their time with the guests interrupted for photos, so we took a quick walk through the vineyards just before sunset, once the cocktail was over and the guests were ready to be taken to dinner. The rest of the day was photographed in a documentary style as usual: candid moments with the guests, genuine smiles and expressions, letting the personality of the day come through the images and interfering as little as possible so that people felt comfortable in front of the camera.
Casa Sacoto always feels like it belongs to a different era - the area around the pool always transports me back to the 50s, and each element of the house feels so well-maintained and authentic that it could well belong to another time. This feeling becomes even more prominent in the film photographs, which already look timeless on their own. The wedding was photographed only on film using a mix of Portra 400, Portra 800, Kodak Tri-x and Ilford Delta 3200.
Photography: Julia Jardim
Video: Happy Together Films
Ceremony Venue: Casa Sacoto
Wedding Planner: Maison Martini
Floral Design: Matiz Flower
Graphic Design: No Naked Design
Catering: Puro Catering
Film Lab: Carmencita Lisboa
Cocktail by the swimming pool at Casa Sacoto
The swimming pool at Casa Sacoto takes centre stage during the cocktail hour - a beautiful bright blue space that guests tend to gather around of. For Kenny and Yeji's wedding the pool became part of decorations, with yellow and orange flowers and balloons floating around it and giving even more personality to the moment.
Ceremony in the courtyard at Casa Sacoto
The ceremony took place at Casa Sacoto's courtyard, an open-air setting framed and partially shaded by the venue's two main buildings. Two tall cypresses serve as a portal between the courtyard and the adjoining gardens. Kenny and Yeji chose to cover the whole area with white drapes that served both as shade for the couple and guests and as part of the decoration, bringing fluidity and softness to a space that could otherwise look structured and perhaps a bit formal. As their photographer, I really appreciated the draping as it created even lighting throughout the ceremony, allowed for much more subtle images - a 2pm sun in June can can be too harsh, especially during the ceremony.
