The most useful thing we do for most families happens in the second week, with a tape measure, and it is usually unwelcome.
Almost every family we meet has a guest list and a courtyard, and in about half of those cases the two do not fit. Finding that out in the second week of planning is inconvenient. Finding it out on the night is a wedding where three hundred people are standing in a lane.
The arithmetic is simple enough to do yourself. A seated dinner needs about ten square feet per guest once you have allowed for service lanes, a stage and a route from the kitchen. A standing reception with a hedhikaa and tea table needs about six. So a courtyard of fourteen hundred square feet, which is a generous Malé courtyard, seats a hundred and forty or holds two hundred and thirty standing. It does not hold three hundred seated, and no decorator can make it.
What people compare it against is a family lunch, where forty relatives felt like plenty of room. Forty people at a lunch are not doing any of the things wedding guests do: queueing for food, standing in groups, taking photographs, arriving while others are leaving. A courtyard at a wedding feels full at about sixty per cent of what the floor area suggests.
There are three honest ways out and they are all better than hoping. Change the format from seated to standing, which is the single biggest gain and costs nothing. Split the arrivals into two waves by putting different times on different invitations, forty minutes apart, which we have done many times and which nobody has ever noticed. Or move to a hall, which costs money and buys certainty.
The one that does not work is reducing the guest list on paper. Families in this country do not turn people away at the door, and the list that was cut to two hundred and twenty in March is three hundred again by June because of people who cannot be left out. Plan for the number who will actually come, which is the number the aunties give you rather than the number on the spreadsheet.
We bring a tape measure to the first venue visit. It is the least glamorous half hour of the whole process and it is the one that decides whether the evening is comfortable.
