Wedding at the Natural History Museum, Hintze Hall

Hintze Hall is a Victorian Romanesque hall of terracotta and stone, and it is the building that guests remember. The architecture was lit with Astera wireless uplighters placed along the arches and columns, so the terracotta glowed from the floor to the vault. Battery powered fixtures keep cable off a heritage floor, and because every unit is controlled together the whole hall could move from amber to red to pink in one smooth change.

Ayrton Perseo moving framing spots did the precise work: shuttered, hard edged light cut exactly to the florals, the staircase and the moments that mattered, and nowhere else. ETC Source Four LED profiles carried gobo washes across the room, adding texture so the space never read as flat colour. The full rig is on our lighting design page.

For dinner the uplighting shifted to deep red and magenta, turning the vault into a ceiling of colour above long candlelit tables. Pin spots picked out the table florals and centrepieces, so each table held its own point of light under the wash rather than sitting in the dark.

The gobo washes came into their own here, breaking the light across the stonework with pattern and giving the long view down the hall real depth.

When the party started, beams went up through the vault and the colour turned to pink and amber, with the moving lights running the dancefloor while the uplighting kept the architecture in the picture. The hall stayed recognisably the Natural History Museum, just louder.

A stone hall of this size is a reverberant space, so the sound system was designed to keep the ceremony and speeches clear before scaling up for the dancefloor. Music came from our sister company Kudos Music, with DJ Arvee.