Some venues give a stylist very little to work with. Aurora Hill Resort gives almost too much. Its suites are built around glass, timber and sky, with the aurora and the fells doing most of the visual work long before a single candle is lit. Styling a wedding here is less about filling a room and more about knowing when to stop.
We have styled proposals at Aurora Hill Resort for several seasons, working closely with StayLapland’s design team on the north-facing suites. Weddings ask something different of the space: more guests, more hours, more moving parts, and still that same instinct to let the view lead. Here is how we approach it.
The Architecture You Are Styling Around
Aurora Hill’s suites are built on a simple idea: glass walls facing north, warm timber interiors, and very little else competing for attention. The ceiling lines are low and honest, the furniture is pared back, and the landscape outside is treated as the real decor. Any styling added to this space has to earn its place.
This changes how we work. In a blank hotel ballroom, structure and backdrop do the heavy lifting. Here, our job is closer to editing than building. We choose textures that echo the timber rather than fight it, a palette that sits quietly against the glass, and a handful of considered objects rather than a full room of them. Restraint is not a compromise at Aurora Hill. It is the correct styling decision.
Ceremony Styling Inside the Suites
Most ceremonies at Aurora Hill are intimate, often thirty guests or fewer, held with the glass wall as the ceremony’s natural backdrop. We rarely build a full arch here. Instead, we work with low floral arrangements at floor height, a single textile runner, and seating angled so every guest has a clear line to both the couple and the view behind them.
Fireplaces, where the suite has one, become a quiet second focal point, dressed with candles and foraged greenery rather than anything that reads as “decoration.” The goal is a ceremony that feels styled by someone who understands the room, not styled over it.
Designing the Reception Around the Light
This is where Aurora Hill asks for genuine expertise. A reception dinner inside a glass-walled suite has one constraint most venues do not: bright interior lighting washes out the aurora and the night sky entirely. If guests are hoping to watch the lights from their seats, the lighting plan has to be built around that from the start.
We use low, warm sources close to the table, hand-placed candles rather than overhead fixtures, and lighting fixtures with dimmers set well below what feels “normal” indoors. It takes a slightly different eye to style a table that still looks considered at low brightness, with metallics, glass and natural texture doing more work than colour. Guests notice the difference the moment the first aurora arc appears over the fells and the room stays dark enough to see it.
Seasonal Shifts in the Approach
Aurora Hill is booked for its namesake lights for much of the year, but the styling brief shifts with the season. In deep winter, we lean into candlelight, faux fur textiles and deeper, warmer tones, since the suites themselves stay bright with reflected snow even after dark. During the midnight sun months, the aurora brief disappears entirely and we style instead for the quality of long, golden evening light, often with lighter linen, pressed botanicals and a cooler palette that holds up against near-constant daylight.
Shoulder seasons, spring and early autumn, are our favourite stretch to style here. The light changes quickly over a single evening, and a styling plan that photographs well at both 6pm and midnight has to be considered in layers, not fixed as one look.
Working With the Resort’s Own Design Language
StayLapland has a clear design identity across Aurora Hill Resort, and a styling plan that ignores it tends to look like a foreign object dropped into the room. We start every booking here with a short conversation with the venue team about current furniture, finishes and any fixed features in the specific suite booked, then build our proposal to sit alongside that, not on top of it. The result should look like the room was always meant to host this wedding.
For couples drawn to Aurora Hill specifically for the aurora odds and the glass architecture, this collaborative approach is usually the difference between a wedding that photographs beautifully and one that photographs like a hotel function with flowers added.
What to Bring, and What to Leave Behind
Couples often arrive with a full vision board for Aurora Hill before they have seen how the specific suite they have booked actually sits against the landscape at their chosen time of year. We would rather have that conversation early. A colour palette that looks right on a laptop screen can read quite differently against snow-lit glass at nine in the evening, and a centrepiece that would suit a traditional banquet room can crowd a table that already has a view doing most of the talking.
Our advice, almost without exception, is to bring fewer, better pieces: a single considered floral moment rather than one at every place setting, glassware and linen chosen for how they catch low light rather than how they photograph in daylight, and one or two personal touches that mean something to the two of you rather than a long list of details borrowed from elsewhere. Aurora Hill rewards editing. It is one of the few venues where saying no to an idea is often the more luxurious choice than saying yes.
Planning Your Aurora Hill Wedding
If you are considering Aurora Hill Resort for your Lapland wedding, the earlier we are involved, the more we can shape the lighting and styling plan around your specific suite and date rather than retrofitting it later. Our full wedding styling service covers everything from the ceremony setting to the reception table, built around the venue rather than a generic template. You can see the scope of what we offer across venues on our services page.
If you would like to talk through what a wedding at Aurora Hill Resort could look like for your dates, get in touch and we will reply within one business day.
