Becca + Lee
We Brits do love a good pub! So when Becca & Lee looked at options for their wedding in Montreal, being from England like myself, they shied away from the glitzy ballrooms of downtown and chose to host the entire wedding at Maison Publique in the Plateau Mont-Royal area of the city.
Maison Publique means “public house” in French, and true to its name, this restaurant looks like a traditional British pub. Yet its wood panelling and retro wallpaper feel Canadian, too. Chef-owner Derek Dammann once worked as head chef for Jamie Oliver at his original Fifteen restaurant in London and Jamie helped him to open Maison Publique back in 2012. Derek also catered for many of Jamie’s events in North America, including the Oscars twice! The food reminds you of a genuine English gastropub but the ingredients are strictly Canadian. It is also adorned with all kinds of quirky decor and vintage album covers which really adds to its uniqueness. This is not your typical Montreal wedding venue and Becca & Lee certainly did not have a typical Montreal wedding.
My absolute favourite weddings are always the ones where the couple throw the wedding rulebook out of the window and do exactly what they choose to do, and this wedding is a great example of that.
My day began at the couple’s home just a short walk from the venue where their closest friends and family joined them and their super cute dog Trevor to hang out and prepare for the wedding. It was also my first time meeting makeup artist Chelsea Dawn Chawsky despite having been Facebook friends with her and recommending her to clients for a while.
It was a chilled but fun start to the wedding day before we walked around to Maison Publique for the ceremony. The restaurant is cosy and that means it’s one of the smallest venues I’ve ever shot a wedding in, if not THE smallest. That meant there were a few challenges when it came to photographing the day, as inside was pretty crowded leaving me with limited vantage points to documenting everything. But the negatives were FAR outweighed by how fantastic the wedding felt in this venue with all of their favourite people filling the room.
The actual wedding ceremony was short and sweet (less than ten minutes in fact) and officiated by their good friend which made it feel even more intimate and personal. After it was done, the day was filled with some of the best food I’ve had at a wedding (I even took Evelyne there for a meal a couple of months later), some hilarious speeches, a few cocktails and just a generally relaxed vibe that allowed all their guests to really enjoy the day.
I loved this wedding! Since then, Becca & Lee have joined Evelyne & I on a night out at Just For Laughs and I’m sure we’ll get to hang out again soon. #Britsabroad 🙂
Big thanks to my friend Tom Halliday for recommending me for this wedding too.
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Below is a short slideshow of some of my favourite recent wedding photos… Take a look. And turn the sound up!
I’m a Brit living in Montreal with my wife, Evelyne and our three boys! Evelyne and I met in the Alps in 2003 when Evelyne thought she was a cool snowboarder and I thought I was a superstar DJ. We got married in 2007 in Cornwall, England and moved to Canada in 2014.
I photographed my first wedding in 2006 and have now shot almost 500 weddings, mostly in Canada & the UK, but I absolutely love travelling anywhere in the world. I enjoyed it when I started but love my job now more than ever.
