Lighting

If you have one upgrade left in the design budget, buy lighting. Nothing else changes a room by as much for as little, and nothing else is as reliably skipped.

3 things are usually being sold. Uplighting washes the walls in colour and quietly hides a dated carpet or a beige ceiling. Pin-spotting drops a narrow beam onto each centrepiece, which is what makes florals photograph the way they do in magazines. And dance-floor lighting, intelligent fixtures on a small truss, replaces the flat house wash that makes every dance photograph look like a school gymnasium.

The most useful conversation to have is not about fixtures but about dimming. Ask whether the venue's house lights are on a dimmer and who controls them during dinner. A room at 40 per cent with candles on the tables is a different room entirely, and it costs nothing.

One rule of thumb from the collective's designers: if the venue has high ceilings, spend on uplighting; if it has low ceilings, spend on pin-spots and candles instead. Uplighting in a low room simply makes the ceiling louder.

“A room at 40 per cent with candles on the tables is a different room entirely, and it costs nothing.”