Your Wedding, by the Sea
Intimate weddings • Coastal setting • Exclusive use • Entirely yours
Some wedding venues give you a room for a day. Waterwynch gives you a house for days.
When you marry here, you are not hiring a venue. You are booking the house for the weekend, and the wedding is what happens in it.
Weddings at Waterwynch
Set in its own beach just outside Tenby, in Pembrokeshire, Waterwynch House is an exclusive-use licensed wedding venue sleeping up to 30 guests across 12 ensuite bedrooms. When you marry at Waterwynch, the house, the gardens, the woodland and every shared space belong entirely to you and your guests for the duration of your stay. There are no other guests, no shared corridors, no strangers at breakfast the morning after.
No hotel can sell you the absence of strangers. Waterwynch is built around it.
The weddings that work best at Waterwynch are intimate ones, typically with around 20 to 50 guests. At that scale, the celebration centres naturally around the people staying in the house. A day shaped entirely around the couple rather than fitted into a venue’s standard package.
We welcome all couples and believe every wedding should feel personal, unhurried and completely your own.
Read our journal for a clear-eyed look at what a wedding at Waterwynch actually is →
A wedding venue that doesn’t feel like one
At many venues, the day is shaped around the venue's operations: the package, the preferred suppliers, the schedule, the minimum spend. At Waterwynch, the venue fits the wedding.
There are no fixed packages and no minimum spend. You are free to bring your own caterers, your own suppliers, your own drinks, and shape every element of the day around what matters to you, although we do have a curated list of suppliers to get you started. The house provides the setting, the licensed ceremony spaces, the infrastructure and the freedom. Everything else is yours to decide.
For couples who want a wedding that feels genuinely personal rather than generically elegant, that freedom is the point.
Staying together under one roof
One of the practical advantages of a Waterwynch wedding is simplicity. Your closest family and friends stay together in the house itself, rather than spread across multiple hotels and taxis. The ceremony, the celebration and the morning after all happen in the same place, overlooking the sea.
Everyone is still there. The people who gave speeches, the ones who danced longest, the friends who came from furthest away. All of them are in the house, at the table, with coffee and the view south across Carmarthen Bay. There is no checkout pressure the morning after, no dispersal to different hotels, no sense that the occasion has ended and ordinary life has resumed.
The wedding is one day. The weekend is what surrounds it, and for many couples the surrounding turns out to be what they remember most.
Ceremony and celebration spaces
Waterwynch offers a choice of licensed ceremony spaces in West Wales, each with its own character and atmosphere.
The Sky Room is one of the most distinctive ceremony spaces on the Pembrokeshire coast. A full glass roof floods the room with light, and the sea fills the windows behind the couple as they make their vows. It is inside and outside at the same time: sheltered, warm and intimate, yet with the bay and the headland and the open water as the backdrop to everything. Photographs taken here tend to look like no other wedding photographs.
The Great Hall provides a striking and more formal setting. The Beach Garden, overlooking the bay, can be used for outdoor ceremonies when conditions allow. The dining room and terraces extend naturally into the celebration that follows.
Each space flows into the next, allowing the day to move from ceremony to drinks to dinner to dancing without the sense of transition that a conventional venue imposes. In the evening the bar, the Great Hall and the gardens draw guests together naturally, and the celebration continues at its own pace rather than ending when the venue closes.
Christmas, reindeer and a harpist: One Waterwynch wedding
Sophie’s wedding celebration at Waterwynch took place at Christmas, with around 25 staying guests and a handful of additional family members joining for the day. She brought her own real Christmas tree. In the car park, she arranged a reindeer petting zoo for the children and guests arriving on the day. During the wedding meal, a harpist played in the dining room overlooking the sea. In the evening, a live band filled the Great Hall.
None of that was arranged by us. All of it was possible because the house was theirs, entirely, for the duration of the stay.
Sophie described it afterwards as “a place to build once in a lifetime memories. There was nothing we could have asked for that wasn’t at Waterwynch. Space and rooms for all ages to mingle together or not as you see fit. The perfect mix in the most amazing and beautiful setting. Thanks to the team for making our stay and wedding celebration the most magical at Christmas.”
That is what Waterwynch weddings look like when a couple decides exactly what they want and builds it themselves.
The cost of a Waterwynch Wedding
The total cost of a Waterwynch wedding has two elements: the accommodation cost and a wedding fee. It is worth understanding both clearly before you enquire, because together they represent genuinely good value compared with the alternatives.
The accommodation hire covers exclusive use of the house and grounds for your stay, across all 12 ensuite bedrooms, for up to 30 of your group. Every room, every shared space, every inch of the gardens and direct access to the beach and shoreline: all yours.
The wedding fee covers use of the house as a private wedding venue, including your choice of licensed ceremony spaces, all table linen, glassware, crockery and cutlery, corkage-free drinks throughout your stay, and two members of staff to act as legal witnesses for a formal ceremony.
Why the total cost compares well with hotel venues
A hotel wedding may appear cheaper at first glance because the headline price is venue hire only. But at a hotel, your guests pay separately for their own rooms, at rates the couple cannot control. The venue typically imposes a minimum spend on catering and drinks, restricts outside suppliers and charges corkage on any wine not purchased through them.
Drinks from a hotel bar tend to have a threefold mark-up. Even if they allow corkage, it typically adds £15 per bottle of wine and £20 per bottle of prosecco. For fifty guests that is often £800 to £1,200 in charges simply for the privilege of opening bottles you have already paid for. At Waterwynch, the wedding fee includes corkage-free drinks for the duration of your stay.
At Waterwynch, one accommodation cost covers everyone sleeping in the house. The wedding fee is fixed and transparent. There is no minimum spend, no supplier restriction and no corkage charge or over-priced drinks at the bar. You are free to source your own catering, your own wine, your own flowers, your own entertainment. Most couples find our wedding offering very competitive overall compared with similar venues once everything is honestly counted.
Most wedding venues in this category do not publish their prices. Packages are shared on enquiry, after you have seen the grounds and met the coordinator and begun to imagine yourself there. We understand the logic, but it is not how we operate. Our rates are published because we think you should be able to make an informed decision before you pick up the phone. What you see is what you pay.
The wedding fee
The wedding fee applies to all stays where a wedding or relationship celebration of any kind is taking place, regardless of the scale of the event or its legal status. This includes informal celebrations, non-legal ceremonies and blessing services, as well as formal legal weddings.
For anniversary celebrations where a couple married substantially before the stay, the fee does not apply. If you are unsure whether the fee applies to your plans, please get in touch and we will discuss it with you directly.
Wedding Fee Rates:
– April to September: £3,250
– October to March:
Weekend: £2,500
Midweek: £1,800
– Christmas & New Year: £5,000
Read our journal on the costs of a different kind of wedding →
A midweek wedding is worth considering
Weekend availability at Waterwynch is in high demand throughout the year. Midweek and off-season dates offer the same house, the same setting and the same experience at a lower wedding fee, and often with more flexibility on the dates that matter most to you.
Pembrokeshire in autumn and winter has its own particular quality: quieter, more dramatic, the West Wales coast at its most atmospheric. Several of the most memorable weddings at Waterwynch have taken place in the winter months, when the house is at its warmest and the setting feels genuinely removed from the rest of the world.
What the wedding fee includes
Every Waterwynch wedding includes the following as standard:
Exclusive use of the house and grounds as your private licensed venue. A choice of licensed ceremony spaces indoors and outdoors. All table linen, glassware, crockery and cutlery. Corkage-free drinks, allowing you to source and serve your own wine, champagne and spirits. Two members of staff as legal witnesses for formal ceremonies. Access to our dedicated digital wedding guide, which brings together everything you need to plan your day.
Enhancements available on request include additional day guests beyond the staying group, extended dining layouts for larger formal gatherings, and introductions to our trusted local catering and bar service partners who know the house well.
A note on scale
Waterwynch suits intimate weddings. Fifty guests is the maximum, and for some couples that constraint is liberating. It provides a natural limit that makes the guest list a considered thing rather than a social obligation. Many of the weddings here involve thirty guests or fewer. Some involve only those sleeping in the house.
If your vision is a large wedding with a hundred guests, a grand ballroom and a full production, Waterwynch is not the right fit for you. If your vision is the people who matter most, a house that holds them, a coastline outside the window, and a weekend that belongs entirely to you, that is what Waterwynch does.
Looking for a hen or stag weekend?
Waterwynch works just as well for a hen or stag weekend as it does for the wedding itself. Some couples use the house for both: the hen weekend with the bridal party in the months before, and the wedding celebration with the wider group when the day arrives.
If you are in the early stages of planning and a hen or stag weekend is on the list, take a look at our dedicated page.
Planning Your Wedding
Every wedding at Waterwynch begins with a conversation. We are happy to talk through your plans, answer questions about the house and its spaces, and help you work out whether Waterwynch is the right fit for your day.
We can also provide a digital wedding guide which brings together practical information about the house, the ceremony spaces, catering options and suppliers.
We would love to hear from you.
Testimonial
“It was everything we had dreamed of and hoped for our Wedding, and so much more. All of our guests were blown away by the standard of the accommodation, not to mention the unique and fabulous location.
What can only be described as an utterly magical weekend at your very special house.
Words can’t really express how we feel about the time we spent there. ”
– G&C