Some houses are grand, and some are historic, and a very few are both on a scale that stops you at the gate. Cliveden is one of them. A Grade I-listed Italianate mansion set high on a chalk bluff above the River Thames, in 376 acres of National Trust parkland near Maidenhead, it has been a great country house for three centuries, home to a Prince of Wales, to dukes, and most famously to the Astors, whose glittering parties made and unmade reputations. Taken exclusively for a wedding, all of that magnificence opens for one couple.
The setting is the first thing that undoes you. Below the terrace, the famous parterre unfolds in long geometric beds, box hedging and statuary drawn out across the lawn, and beyond it the gardens and the parkland roll away to the Thames, silver in the distance. An outdoor ceremony on the terrace, drinks among the formal gardens, photographs against the Italianate facade at dusk: there are few grander stages in England, and Cliveden wears its grandeur without apology.
Inside, the house matches the gardens. The panelled Great Hall, with its vast fireplace and coffered ceiling, is the heart of the place, made for a ceremony and a wedding breakfast; the French Dining Room, brought whole from the Château d’Asnières near Paris, is a jewel box of gilding and mirror; and the grand oak staircase, carved with figures from the house’s past, turns every entrance into a moment. Very little needs adding to rooms like these.
Dining is led by the Cliveden Dining Room, whose menus draw on the estate’s own kitchen garden and the best of British produce for refined, modern British cooking, with the relaxed Astor Grill in the old stables alongside. Wedding breakfasts are served beneath the coffered ceiling of the Great Hall or in the French Dining Room, with canapés and Champagne on the terrace above the parterre, and fine wines throughout, in the generous style the house has always kept.
And because there are 47 rooms and suites, many named for the writers and statesmen who once stayed, the wedding is never just a day. Couples take the house exclusively, guests stay the weekend, and the celebration spreads either side: a swim in the famous outdoor pool below the clock tower, a treatment at the Pavilion Spa, a walk through the parkland to the Thames, breakfast in a house where history was made.
A Grade I-listed Italianate stately home above the Thames, the famous parterre below the terrace and three centuries of history within: a grand, unforgettable Berkshire wedding.
Cliveden House
A Wedding at Cliveden House
For a couple who wants real grandeur, an English stately home to be married in, the famous parterre and the Thames below, and a house that has held three centuries of history, Cliveden House offers all of it under one roof. Vows in the Great Hall, an entrance down the oak staircase, a feast beneath coffered ceilings, the gardens, the spa and the pools, and 47 rooms in the old Astor house: a grand, historic, whole-weekend wedding above one of the loveliest reaches of the river.
- Venue: Cliveden House, Cliveden Road, Taplow, Maidenhead, Berkshire, England
- Images: Courtesy of Cliveden House
