Eolia Mansion Wedding

A romantic autumn wedding in Waterford, CT

Victoria and Kyle’s October wedding at the Eolia Mansion was a beautifully elegant affair with an autumn pink palette and vintage flair! The venue was once the summer mansion of the Harkness family, set on more than 200 acres of sweeping lawns with views of the Long Island Sound. Clarence Chan Photography captured their day!

When Kyle and I started planning our wedding, we had grand ideas for a destination wedding: a ceremony on a mountain top in northern Italy or on a beach in Hawaii. While these ideas would have been wonderful, we realized that as much as our wedding day was for us, it was also about sharing our love and joy with those we hold dear in our hearts. The greater the distance from our home in Connecticut, the more likely that people we care about would not be able to share our special day with us.

Along came the Eolia Mansion at Harkness Memorial State Park in Waterford, Conn., which enabled us to have the local wedding we wanted without compromising on elegance, romance or style. As soon as we visited, we knew the mansion was perfect. Its stunning tall ceilings and beautiful gardens were surrounded by a sprawling lawn leading to panoramic ocean views of the Connecticut coast.

Our wedding was in the fall and inspired an autumnal pink color palette ranging from mulberry to blush pink and champagne. Our florist, Barbara Brewer of Pots and Posies, used this color palette for the flowers in the gorgeous centerpieces along with mercury glass vases and votives that I collected for months before the wedding. We did not want to take away from the venue’s beautiful simplicity and opted to use mercury glass votives throughout the venue to create a warm ambience with a touch of vintage flair.

We wanted our guests to know that we were honored by their presence and poured our hearts into creating a beautiful event filled with handmade touches. We designed and made our wedding programs, which included Kleenexes for happy tears. We have also been fortunate enough to travel the world together and used vintage postcards as our table numbers to highlight our love of travel and recent destinations. We also had flip flops organized by size and color for our female guests to join us on the dance floor. The evening ended with a late-night snack of sliders and fries and a candy bar, filled with our favorite sweets and home-printed candy bags. I expected to see only children gathered around the candy bar but the adults quickly joined in on the fun!

One of my favorite memories from the wedding was the father-daughter dance. My dad and I practiced for weeks before the wedding and started out with a slow song so that he could show off the box-step I taught him. Partway through the song, we surprised our guests with a fast-paced choreographed dance to Pink’s Raise Your Glass. Even to this day, the song brings a smile to my face.
See also
Real Weddings
Northern Michigan Marina Wedding

In the end, our wedding turned out to be truly the most wonderful day of our lives, so far. -Victoria