I promised a follow up to the post I did on the Vancouver International Film Festival Opening Gala, so here it is!  The Closing Gala was held in the historic Salt building, located in the Athelte’s Village in South East False Creek.  For those of you that don’t know, the Salt building is a significant and historic landmark for Vancouver, it’s located on the original shoreline of False Creek.  After being built in the early 1930’s as a refinery for raw salt, it was converted in the 1980’s to a paper recycling facility.  It sat empty for a number of years, until it was restored to it’s original glory prior to the 2010 Olympics.

If you’ve never been inside I highly recommend you go have a look, even if you just peek through the windows. It’s a big red barn like structure from the exterior with glass entrances at either end. The interior has a ceiling of exposed beams, dotted with sky lights. It’s just a big open space with minimal partitions (they have built in some washrooms though), great for holding parties, exhibits or as I said when I walked in, “Oh my god!  You could have a fantastic wedding in here!!” I’ve always loved the look of a bare bones structure like a barn all dressed up on the inside with elegant touches for a wedding.  There’s something about the contrast, it makes it seem so luxurious.

As you will see they really dressed up this space for the event, the theme was Arabian Nights!

Check out that ceiling!  So cool!  As you can see we chose deep, rich tones to reflect the sumptuous and decadent Arabian Nights theme.  We used dark pink lilies, mixed with red roses, red mokara orchids, and hot pink phalaenopsis orchids, along with a mix of burgundy and pink dahlias.  Additions like protea, curly willow and large tropical greens really ramped up the drama of the arrangements.

Big fluffy pink hydrangea are great to use in such large scale arrangements, they fill in a lot of space.  We also added some big bamboo sticks to raise the height and make them as grand as the space they were in.

As you can see it was a pretty extravagant evening.  The team from BLD decor was in there for hours before the event turning the big empty space into a lounge fit for an Arabian Prince and his harem!

And since I mentioned barn weddings earlier I thought I would share a photo of what I was talking about….

Come on…is that not GORGEOUS!!!???

Image via http://blog.thebecker.com