I went from photographing weddings to hosting them

Samantha Gilchrist learnt the hard way that life is too short to be unhappy. She was in her mid-twenties and holding down a steady but unfulfilling job in human resources when her much-loved uncle, John, succumbed to brain cancer. Shortly before his death, in 2006, John passed on some sage advice.
“He was in his late forties and he sat my cousin and me down and told us to get it together. He said, ‘Do something you love. I thought I had all this time left, and I don’t,’ ” recalled Gilchrist, now 43. The very next day, she quit her job to pursue her passion for photography. That snap decision put her on an improbable path to running The Gilchrist Collection, a West Sussex-based business with a portfolio of 12 stunning wedding venues across the UK and America. Gilchrist’s original ambitions were much smaller-scale, though. After ditching her job in HR, she saved up to buy a 3.2-megapixel Polaroid camera for £300 and became a professional photographer.
Over the next decade, she gradually built a thriving business specialising in capturing images of weddings and babies. However, she grew tired of missing the landmark celebrations of her own friends and family, because she was always shooting at the weekends.
Then, in 2018, an unexpected opportunity emerged. Gilchrist was helping a couple find a wedding venue when she discovered that The Ravenswood, a 15th-century manor house in West Sussex, was up for sale. She saw an opportunity to turn it into a wedding venue, but had no savings to turn this dream into reality. So she convinced Stuart Guy, a wealthy family friend who invests in property, to buy The Ravenswood for £2.7 million.
Now Gilchrist and Guy own venues including Rushpool Hall, a manor house in North Yorkshire, and Plas Maenan, an Edwardian country house in North Wales. They are exclusive hire venues, with the company and its guests taking over the whole site for the duration of the wedding and the night afterwards. Packages at The Ravenswood start at £6,800 for a small, midweek wedding, rising to about three times that on the weekend.
Last year, The Gilchrist Collection made pre-tax profits of £60,500 on sales of £17.3 million. Profits are slim because it reinvests in buying and refurbishing new venues. Guy owns 54 per cent of the company, Gilchrist, the chief executive, owns 20 per cent, and an American investor holds the remainder.
“In the beginning, everything hung around Guy’s neck. I brought my wedding knowledge to it, but I had no capital and couldn’t put my name on the mortgage [for a new property]; he had to personally guarantee everything. I have zero qualms with that,” said Gilchrist, who has been paid partly in shares. She started with a 6 per cent stake, which will soon rise to 30 per cent. “He [Guy] is more than fair”.
She explained that she gets her creative flair from her mother, who worked as a window dresser of stores including Selfridges before she was born. After separating from her father, when Gilchrist was four, her mother was unable to carry on dressing windows, which takes place overnight, and took a part-time job in a school instead. “She gave up her whole career to raise me,” said Gilchrist, adding that her childhood was “magical”.
“My mum would make me princess dresses out of crepe paper. We had a council flat that was mouldy and gross, but when we had just moved into it, she painted ‘happy birthday’ on the wall for my birthday party. I remember it being the best day.” Gilchrist loved “pink and fluffy dresses” — especially ones for a specific purpose: “I realised that the local church had weddings, and I made it very clear that I owned my own bridesmaid’s dress and I could be there if they needed a flower girl or bridesmaid. By the time I was 12, I’d been a bridesmaid about eight or nine times.”
As she hit her teenage years, her mother was worried that she had fallen in with the wrong crowd. So she encouraged her daughter to apply to the The Brit School, a performing arts school in south London whose alumni include singers Adele and the late Amy Winehouse. However, Gilchrist, who was happier out of the limelight, majored in set design and stagecraft until she left at the age of 16.
For the next five years, Gilchrist was somewhat rudderless. She bounced between jobs in hospitality and tried to break into fashion journalism with work experience stints on magazines such as Bliss and Heat. Next came a photography course at the London College of Fashion. None of it stuck.
“I thought about going into fashion [photography] but it was too cut-throat. I’ve always been curvy — I’ve never been smaller than a size 12 — and the general vibe of the industry would have caused me to end up way too body conscious. I admire the fashion industry but I didn’t want to put myself in an environment where I was feeling every day like I was the fat person in the room,” said Gilchrist.
Instead, she took the job in human resources, until her uncle John’s intervention spurred her to start her photography business. Her cousin, who received the same advice, is now a yacht captain. “So he got it together, too,” she said.
It was slow going at first but Gilchrist steadily built up the business. By the time she was into her thirties, however, she was desperate to reclaim her weekends. “My husband’s cricket team thought that I was a myth because I’d never been to a match. I lost the entirety of summer to weddings,” she said. “I was doing everything myself — the sales, the planning, running the days.” Going into the wedding venues business with Guy at The Ravenswood seemed to offer a solution — but only when they had just that one site. When they bought Crowcombe Court, a Georgian manor house in Somerset, Gilchrist became too stretched. “The transition to having two venues was probably the hardest thing, because I thought I had to be at the venue to make it work. So trusting someone else to do that was really difficult.” The Ravenswood is now flourishing, though: after hosting just 14 weddings in its first year — including Gilchrist’s own, to her husband, Garion — the venue hosted 290 last year.
Gilchrist took on a third venue, Rushpool Hall, days before the first lockdown. “The pandemic was a nightmare — I had to move 190 weddings, some of them three times.” It wasn’t enough to take the wind out of their sails, however, as The Gilchrist Collection acquired two more sites, Highley Manor in West Sussex and Hackness Grange in North Yorkshire, in the summer of 2020.
It was also a tumultuous time in Gilchrist’s personal life. In 2019, she suffered the first of four miscarriages, picked up at her 12-week scan, with two more following in 2020. She had another in 2022, and hasn’t become pregnant since. She and Garion are considering adoption and surrogacy but have come to terms with their situation. “We have decided that if we don’t ever have children, that’s OK. We have a chuckle when our friends tell us their schedule for the weekend — which involves kids’ parties and football or treatment for nits — and we’re going to stay in a spa for a weekend with our dog.”
Gilchrist has started sharing her experiences on social media to help others. “So many people came back and said, ‘We lost three [babies]’, or ‘I know someone who has had 13 miscarriages.’ It happens in one in four pregnancies, and being open about it has put me in a position where people have confided in me.”
She remains upbeat — “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” — and last year launched the Gilchrist Brides Club, a ten-part video series on how to plan a wedding. It is free for brides booking a Gilchrist Collection venue for their big day, but available to anyone for a monthly fee of £27. “In the UK we don’t really use wedding planners, and what we hear all the time [from couples] is, ‘We’ve never done this before and we don’t know what to do next.’ ”
It’s a different story in the US, where Gilchrist and Guy now have venues in Florida, Missouri and Texas. Across the pond, where wedding planners are the norm and parents still pay for weddings, The Gilchrist Collection provides the venue and leaves it to guests to sort out their own food and bar. The American business, Gilchrist said, is thriving and one of the venues now hosts about 280 weddings a year. “And it has only eight staff,” she added.
Her job has given her an insight into some of the more bizarre “big day” wish lists. Couples have inquired about the possibility of bringing elephants, scorpions and even a whole “petting zoo” — a collection of animals that children can feed — along to their wedding. “We’ve had many horses, dogs and cats come and be part of the wedding, and we’ve had owls and other birds of prey fly the rings down the aisle,” said Gilchrist.
“We’ve had every theme — from Star Wars to Star Trek and Harry Potter to Disney. We’ve even had a donkey serving beers.”
My hero … my mum. She brought me up in a creative, magical world and created an environment where I believed anything was possible. When we first found The Ravenswood, plenty of people thought I was insane, but my mum was like, “Go for it.”
My best decision … to be unapologetically myself. There was a time where to be a chief executive meant being very masculine and shouty. I’ve embraced the fact that I like pink and things that are fluffy and will happily come to the office in pyjamas and Ugg boots.
My worst decision … not delegating sales at The Ravenswood to someone else sooner. I thought I was doing well selling three weddings a week. Then I hired a salesperson, and in her first week she sold six.
Funniest moment … An elderly man had fallen over at a wedding and he was on blood thinners so there was blood everywhere. I was scrubbing it off the steps afterwards (he was fine) and noticed some legs sticking out of a nearby bush. Thinking someone else had fallen over, I went to investigate — but as I got closer, I saw it was two sets of legs. About five minutes later, the couple sheepishly walked past us back to the wedding.
Best business tip … Know your numbers inside out. Every Wednesday, I evaluate every single number — what the weekly income was, how many weddings we delivered, how many weddings were cancelled, how many people we fed, and so on. It’s allowed me to find things that are successful in one venue and implement them in another.