Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay opened a new lawn space overlooking the water, and Seashine Weddings & Events built a coastal blue styled shoot around it to show what the space can do. Gabro supplied the rentals: the chairs, the tables, the linens and the lounge furniture that turned an empty stretch of grass into a wedding.
An empty lawn is the hardest brief a venue can give you
A ballroom arrives with a floor, walls, power and a shape. A lawn arrives with grass. Everything that makes it a room comes in on a truck, and every one of those pieces has to work on ground that is soft, slightly uneven and completely open on all sides.
That is why a new outdoor space is usually shot before it is sold. Couples cannot picture two hundred people on a photograph of empty grass. Furnish it once, properly, and the venue has something to show; the planner has a portfolio piece; the rental order becomes the proof that the space works.
The plan here was straightforward and reads that way in the photographs: dinner tables on the open lawn facing the water, ceremony seating set toward the palms, and a lounge tucked to one side so the space has somewhere to go between the two.
Ground conditions decide more than people expect. Grass that looks level from the terrace rarely is, and a round table with four hundred pounds of place settings on it will find every soft spot. Tables get sited and packed before anything goes on them, because a wobble discovered after the linens are down means stripping the whole thing back.
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Gold chairs against blue, white and a lot of green
Gold chiavari chairs carry the ceremony. Set in rows on grass with palms behind them, they do something a white folding chair cannot: they hold a warm note against all that blue and green, so the setup reads as furnished rather than merely seated.
They are also a practical choice outdoors. A chiavari is light enough to move in numbers as the sun shifts and rigid enough not to sink or splay on soft ground, which matters when the same chairs are being reset between ceremony and dinner.
Colour discipline is what keeps it from tipping into theme. The palette here is essentially three things — white, cobalt, and the gold of the chairs — with the landscape supplying everything else. Add a fourth and the lawn starts competing with the water behind it.
Reset time is the other reason chair choice matters on a lawn. Between a ceremony facing the water and dinner facing the tables, the same seats often have to move, and a chair that stacks and carries in fours turns a forty-minute changeover into a twenty-minute one.
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A lounge is what stops guests standing up all night
The rattan lounge with white cushions is the piece people skip and then miss. Cocktail hour on a lawn has no bar rail, no window ledge and nowhere to put a drink down, so without seating everyone stands in the same three spots and the far half of the space goes unused.
Woven furniture is the right register for this venue. It matches the coastal material language the resort already uses, it does not read as formal indoor furniture stranded outside, and it photographs as part of the landscape rather than an object placed on it.
Placement does the rest. Sited near the umbrellas and the cocktail tables, the lounge gives the lawn a second centre of gravity — somewhere for guests who are not dancing, not eating and not queueing to actually be.
Cushions are the detail that decides whether it gets used. Outdoor lounge seating that has been sitting in Florida humidity all afternoon is uninviting in a way guests notice immediately, so cushions arrive covered and go on late — close enough to the start that the first person to sit down finds them dry.
Furnishing an outdoor space?
Chairs, tables, linens and lounge furniture come from one order across Tampa Bay, specified for ground that is open, soft and entirely yours to shape.
Shoot Credits
Venue: Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay · Planning and Design: Seashine Weddings & Events · Photography: Amber McWhorter Photography · Florals and Decor: La Maison des Fleurs · Hair and Makeup: Adore Bridal · Stationery: madWOLFE Design · Rentals: Gabro Event Services · Originally featured on Marry Me Tampa Bay.
