Where to start planning your wedding, once you're engaged

For the first few weeks, an engagement belongs to other people. The ring is photographed from every angle and the champagne comes out rather too often. Then the house goes quiet, and the two of you are left with a blank page.

A handful of decisions have to come first, because everything else is built on them.

Let the season set the scene

Choose a season before a date. A search that begins with the second Saturday in October starts with most of the doors already closed. "Late summer, ideally a weekend" keeps them open.

This coast rewards that flexibility. Its most sought-after properties host a single wedding each weekend and are booked eighteen months to two years ahead for the months that matter most: the long evenings of November to March, the stillness of a Knysna winter, or a Hermanus wedding timed to the southern right whales moving through Walker Bay. Some will still have a date twelve months out, and it is always worth asking about midweek.

The scale of the celebration

Decide early whether the day is to be intimate or expansive. The two ask for different venues and a different kind of evening, and a lawn that holds one long table beautifully can feel bare beneath a marquee.

An approximate size will do, provided it is settled before the first venue is approached. A few properties flex with ease. Wildekrans can hold a close ceremony in its ivy-covered chapel or let the day grow beneath a marquee on its grounds, and Ashford Oval, a macadamia farm above Robberg Beach, adapts in much the same way.

The details that matter most

Most couples arrive at their first venue with a list borrowed from other people's weddings and a phone full of saved photographs. Very few have sat down together and agreed on the two or three things they would protect if everything else had to go. It might be the food. It might be every close friend from twenty years ago, at a single table.

Name them early. Every later decision, from the venue to the hour of the ceremony, can then be measured against them.

A venue in its true light

Go back at the hour you would actually marry. A venue seen at eleven on a weekday morning, the chairs stacked against a wall and the lawn being mown, is a different place by four in the afternoon. The light will have swung round. The lawn that looked open at midday may lie in the shadow of the house, and the view that drew you there can dissolve into the glare of a low sun.

While you are there, walk the distance an elderly aunt would have to manage from the car park in her good shoes. Stand where the vows would be said and listen for a road beyond the trees, or the wind coming off the water.

For couples planning from abroad, that second visit is rarely possible, and they follow Carón's lead on the light. The coordination begins from a couple's first sight of a venue and, for those marrying from further afield, usually months before, in photographs sent across time zones and in long conversations about the day they have in mind.

The people who must be there

Every guest list contains a few names without which the day simply would not happen. A grandmother who no longer travels far. A brother working abroad who needs three months' notice to take leave.

Ask them before a deposit is paid. For a destination wedding the question matters twice over, because a date announced too late can quietly empty the chairs.

Settle the list itself before the date goes to anyone, together with one rule for plus-ones. Applied evenly from the first name to the last, it saves the uncomfortable conversations that follow a rule made case by case.

Bringing in a second pair of eyes

Decide early how much of this you want to carry yourselves. A coordinator brought in three months before the day can only tidy what has already been decided. Brought in at the start, a coordinator helps decide it, and the difference shows in everything from the choice of venue to the order of the speeches.