Wedding decor and design in Kerala

The palette Kerala already has

The state hands you a colour scheme before you choose one. Kasavu — off-white cotton with a gold border — is what most of the family will be wearing, and it photographs against greenery and brass far better than it does against a saturated backdrop. Jasmine, banana stems and leaves, brass lamps, coconut palm, and the tharavadu woodwork of an older property are the materials the setting is already made of. A design that works with them costs less and looks more like a Kerala wedding than one imported wholesale from a Delhi or Bombay reference board, which is the single most common brief we are asked to fix.

That is not an argument for doing the same thing every time. It is an argument for deciding what the wedding is against the room it is in — a Fort Kochi courtyard, a lakeside lawn at Kumarakom, a 2,000-seat hall in Thrissur and a tea-garden lawn in Munnar want four genuinely different answers.

Church, mandapam and resort want different decor

A church wedding is decorated inside somebody else's rules, and they are not negotiable. The parish decides what may be fixed to a pew, what may stand near the altar, and how long before the service your team may be in the building — frequently very little, because there may be a service before yours. So a church design is aisle, entrance and altar arrangements that can be installed quickly and removed quickly, and the ambition goes into the reception hall, which is a separate building and often a separate town. Two venues, two builds, one day. The Christian wedding page covers that whole logistics problem.

A mandapam or auditorium is the opposite: you are renting the room for the day, so you can build. The constraint is time — what hour the previous wedding clears and what hour yours must be out — and the fact that a sadya served in sittings means the dining hall is a working room that turns over several times. Decor that obstructs the service aisles slows the sitting, and a slow first sitting is why the third one eats at three o'clock.

A backwater or beach resort is a design problem of a different kind. Everything arrives on a truck and sometimes a boat: if a structure cannot be carried in and built by hand it does not happen. Lake and sea air are hard on raw metal and on anything that has to hold a crisp edge for twelve hours. And the light is the real asset — the hour after dawn on a lake and the hour before sunset on the coast are worth designing the schedule around rather than fighting with fixtures.

A hill property in Munnar, Wayanad or Thekkady adds cold and mist to the list. Evening functions want heat and lighting that reads through haze, and anything travelling up a ghat road has to survive the journey.

What the monsoon and the humidity decide

Kerala gets two monsoons, and even outside them the air is heavy. Practically, that means: fresh flowers have a shorter life here than the same flowers inland, so jasmine and tuberose work best when they are installed late and in volume rather than early and sparingly; paper, unsealed card and untreated fabric will not hold a crease through a humid afternoon; raw timber and MDF swell; and anything outdoors needs a physical wet-weather answer rather than a reassurance — a built covered space of a stated capacity, or a structure brought in and paid for. The design has to be able to move indoors without becoming a different wedding. The rain guide covers the schedule side of the same question.

What moves the number

• Fabricated or hired. A set built for your wedding costs more than one that has been through four other weddings this season, and it is the difference between a wedding that looks like yours and one that looks like the venue's.
• Flowers, and which ones. Flower cost is a market rate on the week, not a fixed line, and imported stems in a humid room are an expensive way to be disappointed. Volume in local flowers usually beats scarcity in imported ones.
• How many surfaces. One mandap is one build. A mehendi, a ceremony, a reception in another room and an entrance for each is four.
• The build window. An overnight build before a pre-dawn muhurtham costs more in crew hours than a build with a full day, and some venues will not open early enough to make it possible at all. Establish it before you sign.
• Whether the venue lets us in. Some properties are in-house decor only; some permit an outside team against an access charge. That answer decides who builds your design, so we settle it during the venue contract rather than after.

We do not publish a decor price list, and would distrust one that existed: no two of these weddings are the same build. What we do is draw it first, then quote it line by line, so you can see what each element costs and change it before anything is made.

Read next

• What a full-service planner does — design is half of it
• The rain plan — the schedule side of the same problem
• What a package covers — and where decor sits in it
• The venue book — 107 venues, and what each one permits