A WEDDING AT THE JUVET LANDSCAPE HOTELIda & James

Ida and James spent the first hours of their wedding day on a hillside above the fjords, before the light was even up.

The spot came together at the last minute. I had been at Ålesund airport the afternoon before, looking at the map for somewhere worth taking them, and found a shelf of hillside high above the water. Driving out to check, it turned out even better in person. The only catch was that it needed sunrise, which meant asking the two of them to give up part of the one morning nobody would have blamed them for sleeping through.

They said yes without much fuss, climbed up there in the dark in their wedding clothes, and stood in it while the sun came over the mountains. It is one of the calmest, happiest starts to a wedding day I have been let into, and none of it happens without them being game for it. Ida put it more generously than I would have, in her review afterward: “if Cole proposes a slight change of plans, take him up on it.”

The sunrise

So the day began up there, hours before anyone said a vow.

One of the fathers came up with them too, drone in hand, keen to fly it over the whole thing, and he was more than welcome. A wedding belongs to the family as much as to the couple, so if someone is willing to set an alarm for a ridiculous hour to be part of it, the only right answer is yes.

Juvet

The wedding itself was at Juvet, which is less a hotel than a set of glass works of art scattered through a river gorge in the Norwegian mountains.

Juvet Landscape Hotel sits above the Valldøla, an hour or so inland from the coast, past the switchbacks and the sheep and the old turf-roofed farm it grew out of. The rooms are small dark cabins with one enormous window each, aimed at the trees and the water, so that inside them you are more or less standing in the landscape with the weather kept off. It is one of the great places in Norway to get married, and I have now been lucky enough to photograph a wedding here before. I would happily do it for the rest of my life.

The morning

Back at Juvet the morning was the quiet part: the dress on an old carved door, the light coming in sideways, the calm before any of it began.

The tea ceremony

Then the tea ceremony, which was the heart of the day.

Before the wedding proper, Ida and James held a tea ceremony, the old Chinese ritual where the couple serve tea to their parents and elders to say thank you, and to ask, formally, to be let into each other’s families. They did it in one of the glass cabins, red double-happiness paper on the windows and the mountains behind it, kneeling to hand cups of tea to the people who raised them. It is a slow, deliberate thing, and it undoes people. There were more tears in that little room than anywhere else all day.

The ceremony

The ceremony was outside, by the river, everyone close enough to hear the vows crack a little.

The two of them

I never make couples vanish for an hour of portraits in the middle of their own wedding.

Something I suggest instead is little breaks through the day. Five minutes here, ten there, spread out, which adds up to more than you would think and barely pulls you away from your guests. With Ida and James one of those was down at the gorge, where the water runs an unreal shade of green.

The party

And then the part weddings are actually for: eating, crying at the speeches, dancing in a field until the sun finally went down.

Last light

It ended the way the best ones do, outside by a fire, nobody in a hurry to call it. If you are getting married at Juvet, I would love to be there for it. And if someone suggests getting up before dawn for a photograph you had not planned on, well, Ida already told you what to do.