Field notes from a small studio that plans eighteen weddings a year.

We are often asked, in early conversations, whether a venue is "good for a wedding." It is an understandable question. But a venue that performs well for a wedding is not always a venue that performs well for a marriage — for the long, slow evening when the playlist has softened and the speakers have been moved inside and the only people still on the terrace are the people who know each other well enough to be quiet together.

What we look for, on first scout, is restraint. The coast that doesn't need to be sold is rarely the most photographed one. It is the one with too few restaurants, too much weather, and a light that asks something of you. It is the coast whose cliffs are still the colour of the stone they were cut from. It is the coast you can stand on, in March, and not feel you have been styled.

Our short list this season is small — four shores across Portugal, two in southern Italy, one in the Cyclades, and a single stretch of Atlantic coast in Tulum we have not yet written about publicly. The decision, for the couples we work with, is rarely between coasts. It is between versions of themselves.