Sarah and Jimmy's Terrara House Estate Wedding

Sarah and James

Jimmy and I met at university. He had his last two subjects to go in his masters in environmental management and I had the last two to go in mine. Strangely enough we picked the same subjects. I’d never seen him before. But I noticed him straight away. I wanted to be right next to him but I did not want to let him know that! He had this cocky certainty about himself, like he was taking on the world. We were both in a really good space, we had spent some time alone building our independence, getting to know ourselves and doing our own thing. After the first time I spoke to him I remember getting into my car, ringing my best friend and telling her I was going some sort of crazy because I felt like I’d just met the most amazing man in the universe.

Our first date was a picnic in Sydney’s botanical gardens. I turned up to the picnic late with nothing and he had everything, the wine, cheese, picnic rug, frisbee etc. The picnic turned into dinner which turned into me meeting his parents the next night, which turned into us being inseparable! We moved in together a couple of months later and not too long after, Jimmy took me back to the botanic gardens for another picnic and asked me to marry him. He got a friend to set up a picnic with a sign (Jimmy loves Sarah) and he had made a book with illustrations which described the story of our relationship. At the end of the book he got down on both his knees (oops!) and asked me to marry him!

We were going to elope. I had always told my mum that I would get married in Jamaica. But then we read about this magical garden estate on the South Coast in NSW. As soon as we drove through the gates of Terrara House Estate, into the pine forest and lush gardens we were hooked. If we were going to get married in front of all of our lovely family and friends then we would do it here.

The woods, the veggie gardens, the fresh country air, perfect. We had been to a few weddings in our time and we had some pretty strict criteria on what we wanted and it was as if the Estate was created for our fussy tastes.

We wanted everything to have a fun, vintage, french chic feel. We had the perfect pallet and from there started filling it with things we love… vintage games, berry daiquiris, old world cameras and even older world photos of those passed before us. In preparation we collected frames and old cameras from op shops, etsy and ebay.

We made our seating plan out of an old wooden photo stand and filled it with our favourite photos and we made our seating tags on beautiful stationery prints with personal messages.