Scale and sunlight at Powerscourt House

The avenue does the introductions. A mile of beech trees, straight as a ruler, and then the house: the Palladian front that Richard Cassels built for the first Viscount Powerscourt in the ten years to 1741, on the bones of a castle that had stood on the spot since the thirteenth century. The car goes quiet. That happens at every big house, and it happens harder here, because beyond the house are the terraces, and beyond the terraces is the Sugar Loaf.

There is a story in the walls worth knowing before you book. In November 1974 a fire gutted the house, and it stood as a shell for more than twenty years until the Slazenger family, who have owned the estate since 1961, restored it in 1996. Only a couple of rooms look as they did before the fire. Everything else was made new, which is why a Georgian ballroom here can be double height and full of daylight, and why the house wears its grandeur with less dust than most.

The wedding itself runs through three rooms. Vows in the marble entrance hall. Dinner for up to 168 in the ballroom. The evening in the Garden View Rooms and the private bar, with the gardens and the mountain filling the windows. On a dry day there is a fourth: a blessing at the Bamburg Gates in the Rose Garden, with the hall kept in reserve if the sky turns.

Powerscourt gives you the view. Our job is to make sure your film is about the two of you standing in it.

The hall, the ballroom and the sound

Marble is beautiful on camera and unforgiving on a microphone. A hall of stone and high ceilings throws every word back at you a beat late, so we record the vows on small personal microphones on the two of you and the celebrant. The echo stays in the room, where it belongs, and the words arrive clean in the film.

The ballroom is the kind of room that swallows people if you let it. A wide shot of a double-height Georgian room with a wedding somewhere in the middle tells you a great deal about plasterwork and very little about the two of you. So we shoot tighter here than at most venues, the way we do at Carton House, and let the room drift into the edges of the frame while the faces stay in the middle. Later, when the party moves to the Garden View Rooms, be near a window as the sun goes. The last light of the day comes across the terraces and lands there.

The terraces and the people on them

Forty-seven acres of garden step down from the house to Triton Lake, with the Japanese Garden, the Pepperpot Tower and the walled garden off to the sides. You do not need to see all of it. The top terrace gives us the whole composition in one place, house behind you, lake and Sugar Loaf in front, and twenty minutes there is worth an hour of walking. If you do want the lake, know that the steps are long and steep, that heels will disagree with them, and that the walk back is uphill in a dress.

One honest note. The gardens are a public attraction, open until half five for most of the year, so on a summer Saturday there may be visitors on the terraces while you are having drinks. Ask the wedding team exactly what that means for your date. Once the gates close, the gardens are yours, and the hour after closing is also the hour with the best light, so we would plan your portraits for then anyway.

The house has been on screen since Laurence Olivier filmed Henry V here in 1944, so you will not be the first camera crew on the avenue. From the air, with the terraces and the mountain lined up behind the house, it is one of the great shots in Wicklow. Drone flying is the estate's decision rather than ours, so ask early.

Practical notes

The estate is half an hour from Dublin, which matters for a crowd arriving from town. St Patrick's Church of Ireland sits across the road from the gates, and St Mary's is down in the village of Enniskerry, so a church ceremony followed by the drive up the avenue is an easy day to plan. The house itself is not a hotel. The Powerscourt Hotel is on the estate, and the village is at the bottom of the hill. The catering is Feast, who are based in the house, so the kitchen knows the rooms as well as the staff do.

Worth asking before you book

• What time do the gardens close on your date? And what the team does about visitors during the drinks reception. The answer shapes where and when we film outside.
• Agree the wet-weather plan early. Rose Garden or marble hall. Both are lovely. Knowing which it is by breakfast is what keeps the morning calm.
• Be by the window at sunset. The Garden View Rooms face the gardens and the mountain. Ten minutes there at the right time is the best-looking footage of the night.
• Ask about drones. The estate decides. If the answer is yes, the aerial of the house and terraces is worth the paperwork.
• Budget time for the steps. The terraces are a walk, and a steep one. Twenty minutes at the top gives us the view without the climb.

Powerscourt is one of the few venues where the establishing shot is better than anything we could plan. The trick is to spend the rest of the day close to the two of you and let the house look after itself. It has been doing that since 1741.