Chic Tented Wedding at Home with Hamptons Wedding Planner Ashley Douglass
/We specialize in tented weddings and at private homes and estates. Tented weddings at home are some of our absolute favorite weddings. Our clients that host their wedding at home allow us to make the best use of our two decades of experience, and they are so fun to plan on the design front and clients! There is nothing that comes close to a tented wedding at home.
They are not as hard as you think if you hire a planner such as ourselves. We know this project inside and out, and they energize us too. We will let you know what to expect and how we are going to handle pre-production, execution and strike, so nothing is a surprise.
Contrary to popular belief—or fear—a tented wedding in the rain is fantastic. There's nothing quite like a hopping party under a tent in a storm. Yes, it's safe, and we always know how to prepare for it. This wedding was on September 6th, 2025. If you remember that day and were in New York State, you know how terrible the weather was! But this wedding was phenomenal.
For the ceremony at the Shelter Island Beach Club, the weather was touch and go. As a planner, I keep in touch with other weddings nearby when we're at a tented site in an area with many weddings, such as the Hamptons. We knew it was already raining in Watermill and really coming down in Quogue. The sky was getting darker above us, so at the last moment we decided to move the chairs and ceremony into the rain tent. The bride and groom like funky things, so they beautifully shifted like champs and got married in front of the lifeguard stand that was intentionally positioned on the perimeter of the Sperry tent. In cases like this, when bad weather is predicted, most couples opt for the rain plan. This couple decided to risk it, though we still had to put the rain plan tent up, of course, to be safe. Luckily, this is one of those venues where we could put a rain tent up in a nearby location that wouldn't prevent us from having the wedding in the ideal weather location.
Planning this tented wedding weekend on Shelter Island and in the Hamptons was such a gift. The couple listened to our recommendations—don't only look at photos of weddings for inspiration. In fact, start your wedding design ideas with things, anything really, that aren't pictures of other couples' weddings. Look at interior design, scenery, music, perhaps photos of places you've traveled together and have fond memories of, or artwork, restaurant design, hotel design, and more. We want to find a small spark (or large one) that gets at something that makes you excited and can lead us in a direction that's bound to be something we haven't designed before.
We love planning weddings on Shelter Island. Shelter Island has a feel like none other - the most relaxed luxury one can find in New England. Plus, your guests have the option to stay in either the North Fork like Greenport, NY or in the Hamptons be it Sag Harbor or East Hampton or Bridehampton, ideally. When we work on Shelter Island we have contacts that can arrange for a later ferry shuttle back to the main land beyond the times that are often offered with the regular Shelter Island Ferries.
The first note Bride, Claire gave on design was for the wedding to have some plants. That is it! We want tons of plants and noting that is deliberately wedding. Nothing that would cause us to ”cringe” in the least bit. I brought up the idea, ‘what if we poked fun at weddings’ and that was a hard “YES”! I came up with the idea to have a cake design that is currently trending but to intentionally have the cake maker build it as though it is falling down. It was a home run! Originally they didn’t even want wedding cake. The last thing you want is a wedding menu that screams banquet halls of weddings past. We design a menu that was deliberately strange. Is it a shark, a paddle board, doesn’t matter - it’s cool.
I hope you enjoy this Tented Wedding at a private home it the Hamptons on Shelter Island as much as we do!
