Your Style Guide to a Tent Wedding That Will Impress Your Guests

So, you’ve already done the research, toured the venues, and decided on a tent wedding. Woohoo, how exciting! You’ve picked an extremely customizable venue for your wedding. Now the real fun begins.

I like to think of a tent wedding as a blank canvas with incredible bones. What you do with it is entirely up to you, and when it is done well, there’s nothing quite like it.

Now, if you’re still in the early stages and haven’t yet figured out the logistics side of things, I have a post on everything you need to know before booking a wedding tent. I’d say it’s worth a read first. Then come back here when you’re ready to design.

Ok, on to some wedding tent styling!

The tent itself is a key decision. The structure you choose will either support (or work against!) every styling choice that follows.

The fabric is translucent, which means the light quality inside is quite different than what you’d get from an opaque structure. During the day it’s warm and radiant. At night the tent glows from the outside like a lantern in the landscape.

These are the true blank canvas. No center poles, no obstructions, just open volume ready for your creativity. They’re ideal for when you want a very specific interior world without the structure getting in the way.

These bring the sky into your wedding. The sky becomes part of your ceiling, so you design with it rather than around it. Dancing under a starry night? Yes please!

They have a classic silhouette with those grand, high peaks. Just know that the cables that anchor pole tents extend outward, so your footprint on the property will be larger than the tent size suggests.

The ceiling is likely the first thing your guests will see when they walk in. You can transform the whole ceiling with ivory, chiffon, or organza drapery.

Floral installations at ceiling height are where tent weddings earn their magazine placement.

You'll want to consider the scale. What looks nice on paper reads as modest once you’re standing inside a 5,000 square foot tent. Go bigger than you think!

Tent lighting works in three layers. Ambient lighting sets the overall brightness. Accent lighting highlights specific areas, (e.g., the bar, the cake). And task lighting handles practical needs. All three need to be planned together so that your lighting is balanced all throughout.

Any lighting from above should work alongside your drapery and flowers. You might choose to have chandeliers anchored into the tent structure, pendant clusters over dining tables, or bistro lights strung between poles.

Choosing between two or three of these is what separates a well-lit tent from a spectacular one.

The shift from cocktail hour to reception is where lighting earns its keep. Your lighting designer can program that transition so your tent moves from bright and social, to warm and intimate once dinner begins.

This requires a dedicated lighting professional, not the tent company!

You’ll want to account for how guests move through the tent. In my opinion, the best tent layouts have a clear progression from entrance to bar to dining to dance floor.

If you have the space, I’d also recommend a lounge area. Provide your guests with a grouping of velvet sofas and low tables in one corner as a destination beyond their assigned seat. So chic!

Once again, we’re revisiting the scale of your tent. Floral centerpieces that have great height and dimension in your florist's studio can look modest inside a tent with 20-foot peaks. Go bigger when you can!

And if your ceremony is inside the tent, your flowers need to pull double duty. An aisle lined with full arrangements will hold its own once the chairs are cleared and the reception begins.

Brief your florist with images of the actual tent structure, not just inspiration images. The best florists will use the poles, the peaks, and the rigging points as part of the design rather than treating the tent as a neutral backdrop.

Now it’s time to look down towards the floor. Flooring changes everything about how a tent reads. Grass or no grass? The choice is yours but know that you have some flooring options available to you.

Wide-plank hardwood throughout the dining area creates a cohesive surface that grounds the area in a way that grass or subflooring cannot. It’s also what gives the tent the solidity of an actual venue.

If you want to partition to the room without adding in walls, place patterned rugs over the hardwood define areas within the tent. You could even do a large antique-style rug under the lounge area, a natural fiber rug under the bar, and a solid tone under the dining tables.

A tent wedding at this level is a collaborative production, and the quality of that collaboration directly affects the result. And we want it to be perfect, right?

So, get your planner, florist, lighting designer, and tent company in the same room together before any decisions are finalized. This is where you find out if the chandelier will work with the tent rigging, or if the lighting setup conflicts with the ceiling installations.

These conversations need to happen before load-in…not during it.

Each vendor owns a specific piece of the design. The tent company owns the structure. The florist owns the flowers and greenery. The lighting designer owns the atmosphere. Your planner holds all of it together.

Walk the tent the morning of with your planner and photographer. Look at it from the entrance, from the dance floor, from the back of the room. It’s your last chance to catch anything before guests arrive!

I hope this gave you some useful styling ideas and a clearer picture of what’s possible with a tent wedding. There’s so much creative territory to explore in this space…I admit, I had a lot of fun putting this together for you!

If you want to keep going, browse the rest of my blog for more wedding planning and design content.