At Home With Rosalyn Wikeley, Travel Editor at The Wedding Edition

A bride recently asked me for my favourite item on our wedding list. My answer surprised her: ‘a silver jam lid and a Helmut Newton Coffee Table Monster’ – both not particularly useful, nor fairly balanced between husband and wife, but they were items I’d struggle to justify buying myself and were therefore special, and treasured. 

We were one of those immensely fortunate couples. Fortunate in the not-so-distant sense that we were married on the set date, without postponing or agonising over whether to press on or hold back. Whenever I catch our wedding photos in passing, now framed in tortoiseshell, thick bamboo or engraved silver, I can’t help but see naivety amid all the dancing, cheshire-cat grinning and euphoria, as if someone, somewhere knew what was coming. Insurance conversations were over damaged dresses or a flight cancellations, not a world-wide Pandemic. 

Our honeymoon was the last exotic escapade, or escapade full-stop for a few strange, discombobulating years. Like so many our circumstances changed abruptly, though unlike most newlyweds, we lived and worked together under the same roof, having worked in separate countries. We tapped away on laptops balanced on a console table (the only piece of furniture that had made it to our new home), facing one another on two chairs borrowed from the sympathetic barber on the corner, as if we were about to play chess.  

Amid all this strangeness and GIF proliferation, The Wedding Present Company van chugged up our street like the coca-cola truck at Christmas. Rooms were taken over by boxes which our newly-acquired kittens duly clambered into to inspect. Inside each one lay an item that linked us to one of our friends and family – a salient theme of that whole chapter but one that made the present arrival experience that much more sentimental. They also spun us back to the day and the minestrone of emotions that accompanied it. Not only this but they were actually items I truly needed or had fantasised over, and suddenly longed to use at dinners and social occasions once again. 

It’s The Wedding Present Company’s sharp curation but equally its broad sweep of brands (some exclusive) that initially drew me to create a list with them. The visual layout of the site enabled me to create something close to a moodboard – to essentially decorate the house digitally and pull it into one, comprehensible list where people were safe in the knowledge that we’d love and genuinely use everything on there. We particularly warmed to the charity option, which could be integrated into the list itself, and had endless fun trawling through items on the website, mapping out our lives together via little crisp linen, beach barbecues and cocktail sets.

I fondly remember visiting The Wedding Present Company’s cavernous Chelsea showroom and seeing items I’d lusted over on the website in the flesh, then stumbling upon others I’d clearly missed during late night scrolling missions. It’s the little details that make The Wedding Present Company team a joy to work with and engaged couples feel looked after, from the glass of Nyetimber on arrival to the human being (not robot) on the end of a phone or email, should there be a delivery query or last minute edit. I even took a little grey candle home that still sits in our kitchen. It was one of the most exciting, stress-free aspects of our wedding planning (which was largely executed from pubs with our woeful lack of wifi in a rented Notting Hill flat, and by yours truly as my husband-to-be used international borders as an excuse to duck out of the details). 

The Wedding Present Company was a detail even he was unwilling to overlook, and I watched him trawl enthusiastically through pages of bookends, whisky glasses and garden pots – making the most of our shared access and ability to curate the list together on a ‘live’ page. 

From the paper thin glass tumblers to the rustic-style serving dishes, plump velvet cushions and barista-grade coffee machine, these Wedding Present Company items have now woven themselves into our shared rituals, so their deliberation shouldn’t be taken lightly.