Bury Court Barn sits in the fields at Bentley, a few miles out of Farnham, close enough to where Surrey, Hampshire and West Sussex meet that people argue cheerfully about which county it is in. The building is a proper old barn, converted with a light hand: the oak frame and the beams are all still there overhead, but everything underneath them is modern and warm, and the effect is rustic without the fussiness that word sometimes carries. Bentley station is about 7 minutes away by car, which makes it a surprisingly easy place to get a London crowd to.
The other half of the appeal is the walled garden, a contemporary and rather beautiful piece of planting that gives the whole place a sense of enclosure and privacy. There is an outdoor pergola licensed for ceremonies, and indoors the barn can be divided with elegant curtains so the ceremony happens in one part of the room and dinner appears in the other while everyone is outside with a drink. The barn holds 160 for a ceremony, 180 for dinner and up to 200 standing in the evening.
You get the whole place to yourselves, and you get to stay in it. There are 15 bedrooms across the site — 10 newly built en-suite rooms around the courtyard and 5 more in the Grade II listed oast house, including the bridal suite — sleeping up to 30, which turns the wedding into a weekend rather than a day with a taxi rank at the end. Catering and the bar are handled in house, by a place that has clearly been improving itself for years rather than resting on the beams.
Where the band plays
The barn has a gallery intended for musicians, an unusual and rather lovely thing to find, and it says something about how the room was thought through. Whether your band plays up there or on the floor depends on the line-up and the layout, but either way an old timber-framed barn is about the friendliest acoustic a band can be given: the roof space swallows the harshness, the oak takes the edge off, and a four- or five-piece carries a room of this size without having to push.
How the evening runs
The barn is licensed to midnight, and finishes here have landed at 11pm, 11.30pm and midnight depending on the date, so the first job is to establish which applies to yours before the timings are set. One nice detail worth asking about: an 11pm stop has been agreed here with 11.15pm allowed as the absolute latest for an encore, which is more thoughtful than most venues manage. A quarter of an hour is one more song and a proper ending rather than a band stopping mid-flow, so if it is available to you, tell your act early and the last set can be built to land there.
Music in the walled garden
With a garden this good, most couples spend the afternoon outside and only move in for dinner, which makes it an obvious place for something acoustic while the drinks go round — a duo, a guitarist, a string player under the pergola. Booked alongside the evening band rather than as a separate hire, it keeps both ends of the day in one pair of hands.
Bands available in Surrey and perfectly at home in a venue like this.
More live music in Surrey.
- Surrey Wedding Bands
- Events Bands in Surrey
- Tribute Acts in Surrey
- Surrey Wedding DJs
- Corporate Entertainment in Surrey
Worth reading before you book: Sound Limiters Explained. More questions answered on our England & Wales FAQs.