Longridge House Wedding Photographer

Why we love photographing at Longridge House

If you’ve booked Longridge House, or you booked it when it was still Ferrari’s, and you’re looking for a wedding photographer, here’s how the two of us would work it. The house is on Chipping Lane at Thornley, a couple of miles north of Longridge on the road to Chipping, with the Forest of Bowland in front of it and Preston behind. It’s an 1830s country house. The Ferrari family ran it as Ferrari’s Country House Hotel for 29 years, then sold it in 2024 to Elle R Leisure, the family behind Alberts and the Castlefield Rooms in Manchester. They couldn’t keep the Ferrari name, so it became Longridge House, and it reopened in summer 2025 after a full refurbishment.

The ceremony is the reason to come here. The Dovecote is an outdoor pavilion in the gardens with your guests seated round it and the view off towards Bowland, so the two of you are in the middle with everyone’s faces around you. That’s a good shape for wedding photography: one of us tight on you from inside the circle, the other outside it getting the whole ring of people and the hills. You can also say your vows under the garden arch or on the lawn, and the house is licensed inside as well, so wet weather moves you into the Library or the Garden Room without any fuss.

Inside, the Garden Room has floor-to-ceiling windows and doors onto the gardens, which is where the breakfast goes, and the Library and the Drawing Room do drinks and the quieter moments. There’s an outdoor kitchen for the wood-fired pizzas later on. Numbers run from 15 up to 150 for dining and 200 in the evening, and the whole house can be yours on an exclusive basis.

Everyone sleeps on site. There are 23 bedrooms in the house, and Blackmoss Cottage in the grounds has three bedrooms, sleeps six, and is set up for the wedding party the night before with a hair and make-up area and its own patio. The Snug, with a bar, is for the groom’s side in the morning. With Lee in the cottage and Dom in the Snug, we both get the last hour before you leave, and the walk from the cottage to the house is a photograph in itself.

A Saturday here is a full day with both of us, £1,295, and the whole list is on our prices page. Same-Day Prints are an optional add-on from £69, handed round in the Library while the Garden Room is turned for the evening.

Light and timing

The Dovecote is outdoors, so the pavilion gives the two of you some shade while the guests round you are in whatever the day brings. For a midday ceremony in sun we’d angle you so neither of you is squinting and meter for faces. The Garden Room is glass on the garden side, so it’s bright and we shoot the breakfast without flash until the evening, when the glass turns to mirror and we move to off-camera flash kept low. The Library and the Drawing Room are darker, old-house rooms, warm and kind to skin with a bit of fill. The gardens look out towards the Forest of Bowland, so the backgrounds are hills and sky; the sun goes down behind the hills and we’ll nip out for ten minutes for that. It’s high ground on the edge of Bowland, so bring a layer for the evening. If it rains, the Garden Room doors, the arch under an umbrella and the Library cover it, and the hills look better with weather on them.

Drone

The airspace at Longridge House is clear. Warton’s flight restriction zone is about 22 km to the south-west and Blackpool Airport’s about 30 km west. The old BAE runway at Samlesbury, about 9 km south, stopped flying years ago and closed in 2015. There’s no prison nearby. We ask the venue, we don’t fly over guests or during the ceremony, and the Bowland hills are open country, so there’s room. The drone is £149 on top of your photography, and the shot is the house and the Dovecote in the gardens with the fells behind, or the lawn full of people at the drinks reception. More on our drone page.