A Sailcloth Tent at the Bar Harbor Club: Lighting and Greenery Design for a Coastal Maine Summer Wedding
The Bar Harbor Club sits at the edge of Frenchman Bay with Mount Desert Island’s hills behind it and the Atlantic just beyond the lawn. For a July wedding in a setting like this, the instinct was restraint – white flowers, greenery, touches of blue. It was the same palette that drew Mary Ellen and John to Bar Harbor in the first place. John proposed here, on a favorite walk to Compass Harbor on the Fourth of July, and the couple’s connection to this corner of the Maine coast shaped everything about how the day was designed.
Working alongside Landfall Designs and the floral team at Afterglow Floral, the lighting installation followed that same lead. Capiz honeycomb globe pendants were suspended at varying heights inside the sailcloth tent, each one wrapped with botanical installations that threaded through the fixture and trailed downward. During the day, the effect was textural and organic: the pendants read less as lighting fixtures and more as something that had grown into the space. As the evening light faded over Frenchman Bay, they shifted into something warmer, casting a soft, diffused glow across the tables below.
Capiz honeycomb pendants filter light rather than project it. The result is ambient and gentle – exactly right for a reception built around white flowers and greenery, where the setting is already doing so much of the work. When the light source is quiet, everything underneath it gets to breathe.
The Hudson Horns kept the dance floor full all night. The lighting held through every shift the evening asked of it.
