It seems slightly strange to describe The Grace as a familiar wedding venue, considering it only opened earlier this year, but by the end of 2026 I will have filmed there six times and, according to Lauren, their wedding coordinator, I may actually have worked there more often than any other wedding vendor this year! It wasn’t something I planned, but it has given me an unusual opportunity to get to know a completely new Mayo wedding venue during its first season, and under very different circumstances — church weddings and outdoor ceremonies, beautiful sunshine and fairly typical Mayo rain.
My first visit was in June for Brid and Andrew’s wedding. Brid is local, living only a short distance from The Grace, and their ceremony took place in St Mary’s Church in Westport before we travelled back to the hotel for the reception. I was curious to see the place; there had been quite a bit of interest around its opening within Westport Estate, but one of my strongest memories from that first day isn’t actually of the building. It’s of meeting Lauren, the wedding coordinator in the Grace.
There are certain people you meet while working at weddings whom you like almost immediately, and Lauren is one of them. She was warm, relaxed and incredibly helpful, without appearing to try particularly hard to be any of those things. I also discovered a familiar face in Tigue, whom I knew from his time at Lough Rynn Castle, and over the weddings I’ve filmed there since, I’ve realised that the same warmth seems to run through the wider team. The staff have a genuinely joyous nature about them, which I suspect comes from the culture being created in the place. A beautiful room is obviously important for a wedding, but the people running it can make a much bigger difference to how the day actually feels.
Designed with weddings in mind
The building itself has impressed me more each time I’ve returned. The Grace feels as though somebody thought about how a wedding actually moves through a hotel, rather than designing a hotel first and subsequently deciding where the weddings might fit. There are 129 bedrooms, the ballroom can cater for weddings from 50 to 350 guests, ceremonies can take place indoors or outside, and the main wedding spaces flow naturally into the Garden Terrace and grounds.
The dining room is big, contemporary, bright and airy, opening directly onto a lovely garden area. Close to the hotel the landscaping is quite manicured, with tables, chairs, trees and formal planting, but as you walk further through the gardens it gradually becomes more natural and wild. There are areas filled with wildflowers in unusually strong oranges, purples, blues and yellows, and from a filming point of view this gives me an enormous amount to work with. I can place flowers very close to the lens and turn them into soft areas of colour in the foreground, shoot through them with a long lens, or use the trees and planting to create layers of colour and bokeh behind a couple.
I had the perfect opportunity to use all of that at Tracey and Michael’s wedding. Their ceremony was outside in the gardens and I had four cameras covering it from different angles, but it was later in the day that the grounds really came alive. We returned to the wildflowers for their couple shoot and, towards evening, a streak of low golden sunlight appeared through the trees and fell across the flowers. It was one of those little pieces of luck that you can never arrange in advance, but which can completely change the look of a scene when it happens.
Tracey and Michael’s teaser is actually one of the films I’ve chosen for the Monocle & Co. Cinema, so rather conveniently, you don’t have to take my word for it.
And then there is the Mayo weather
My next wedding at The Grace was Sinead and Fergal’s in July, when the weather provided a rather different test of the venue. Both were getting ready in the hotel, which gave me lots of filming opportunities from early in the morning, and I was working alongside my friends David and Kieran from CMC Photography, who are always good fun and very collaborative to work with.
The rain also answered an important question about any wedding venue in Mayo: what happens when you can’t use the gardens?
Fortunately, The Grace has plenty to offer indoors. There is a lot of natural light, plenty of space to work and a contemporary interior that gives us something quite different from many of the older castle and country-house wedding venues around Mayo and the West of Ireland. I love the character and texture of those older venues, but The Grace has gone in another direction, with clean lines, muted colours and modern furniture, allowing the flowers, clothes and people at the wedding to bring much of the colour.
There is also a very large window beside the top table which, perhaps oddly, has become one of my favourite features of the room. Normally a window directly behind somebody making a speech can be a nightmare to film, because the difference between the bright exterior and the person inside can leave you choosing between a silhouette or a completely overexposed background. At The Grace there is so much greenery immediately outside that it balances the exposure beautifully, while still allowing lots of natural light to frame the people at the table.
It’s probably not something that appeared very high on the architect’s list of priorities, but wedding videographers everywhere should be grateful.
Getting to know the place
My fourth visit was slightly different because it wasn’t actually my own wedding. I was second shooting for Daragh Twomey, an excellent videographer from Cork, and occasionally being the second shooter rather than the person ultimately responsible for the film can be quite liberating.
When it is my wedding, the important things always have to come first. I need the cameras where they should be, clean audio, the right people covered and all of those moments that happen once and can’t be recreated afterwards. Working with Daragh gave me permission to be a little less safe. I could look for unusual angles, spend more time experimenting with compositions and use the drone more extensively than I usually would. We had another beautiful day and some of the footage was spectacular.
The drone is also where the location of The Grace really makes sense. The hotel sits within the 430-acre Westport Estate, close to Westport House, with woodland, the wider Mayo landscape and coastal views beyond. The estate itself has around three centuries of history, while The Grace is part of a much newer chapter in its redevelopment. From the air, particularly towards evening when the sun is setting towards the coast, all of those elements begin to come together.
By my fifth visit, for Ceire and Niall’s wedding, I had stopped feeling as though I was discovering The Grace and had started feeling as though I knew it. I was working this time with my good friend Melissa Mannion on photography, and I knew where the light worked, where the gardens became more interesting, where I could quickly take a couple without removing them from their guests for half an hour, where the drone shots worked and, perhaps most importantly, I knew the people.
There is still one more wedding to come this year, when Maeve and Tom will hold both their ceremony and reception at The Grace, bringing my total to six during the venue’s first year.
Old stories, new chapters
There is another reason, perhaps, that I’ve taken to The Grace so quickly, although it hadn’t occurred to me until I started writing this article.
There is a curious similarity between where The Grace and Monocle & Co. find themselves at the moment.
The Grace is completely new, but it sits within Westport Estate and all the history that comes with it; Monocle & Co. is a new name and a new identity, but behind it are almost two decades of filming weddings under the Mike Flannery Wedding Films name. In neither case has the history disappeared. It has simply become the foundation for something more contemporary.
There are similarities in the thinking too. Both are very deliberately centred around weddings, both have chosen a cleaner, contemporary visual style and both, I think, are looking forward rather than trying to recreate what has gone before. Perhaps that explains some of the affinity I feel with the place. The Grace doesn’t feel like a new hotel trying to look old, just as Monocle & Co. was never intended to disguise the history behind it. They are simply new chapters built on much older stories.
And, as it happens, both of those new chapters began at roughly the same time.
The Grace has a long way to go before anybody can really know what kind of wedding venue it will become. The gardens will mature, Westport Estate will continue to evolve around it and hundreds of couples will gradually add their own stories to the place. But having filmed there five times already, in sunshine and rain, for indoor and outdoor celebrations, and with another wedding still to come, I’ve had a better opportunity than most to see how it works when it stops being a beautiful new hotel and actually has to become a wedding venue.
So far, it fits that role remarkably well.
And considering Lauren already expects me to be back more than anyone else this year, I suspect this won’t be the last time The Grace appears in the Monocle Journal.
