Planning the Layout for Your Wedding Reception

Whether you have a large, generous space for your wedding reception or a more intimate area, it’s important to make the best use of every square inch. One of the key steps in your wedding planning is choosing the layout—assigning where people will eat, where they’ll dance, and so forth. Here are a few tips for making these important decisions.

Tips for Planning Your Wedding Layout

Start with the dance floor and stage. We recommend beginning with these areas. If you’re holding your reception in an established venue where they hold a lot of weddings, someone from the site staff will probably be able to recommend a good place to put the dance floor. Otherwise, the best options tend to be either centering the dancefloor lengthwise alongside one of the venue’s long walls; or to put it at one end of the room, along one of the shorter walls. Recommendation: Put your dance floor on the opposite wall from the main entrance/exit.

Then think about the tables. The next step in the layout planning process is to decide what shape you want your tables to be in—smaller round ones, long communal tables, a special “sweetheart’s table,” etc. This is a key decision to make before you decide where those tables are going to go.

Next, arrange the tables. The general rule for arranging tables is to put the bride and groom in the best seats in the house—often, this means prime view of the dance floor and stage. Then arrange all the other tables symmetrically, perhaps in a U-shape.

Choose who sits where. The specific seating chart is something you can do later in the process, once you have a better idea of which guests will be coming. General rules of thumb: Put your immediate family members at the tables closest to the bride and groom; reserve some seats for older guests that are farther away from the band/DJ.

What about bars? If you’re serving alcohol at your wedding, we generally recommend a bar for every 100 guests or so—ideally placed somewhere along a wall, away from the dance floor, where it’s accessible but not in everyone’s way.

It All Starts with Your Venue

Before you can do the layout, of course, you need to know where you’re holding your big event. If you’ve considered Mosteller Mansion, we invite you to contact us today; we’d love to show you our space and talk with you about the different layout options available. Reach out to us today to schedule a tour!