Two decades of turning wedding chaos into a calm Saturday.
Aisle & Arbor started in a small Fitzroy flat in 2008 with one planner, one van and a stubborn belief that weddings should feel like a celebration, not a project deadline. Seventeen years and two hundred and forty weddings later, the studio has grown into a team of eleven planners, designers and installers who still run every wedding the same way: too much detail, zero shortcuts, and an unhurried respect for the people at the centre of it all.
The Studio
171 Collins Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Australia
Open Monday to Friday, 9:00am – 5:00pm AEST. Weekend appointments are available by arrangement.
It began with one bad run sheet and a stubborn idea.
The first wedding Aisle & Arbor ever coordinated was for a cousin in the Dandenongs, and it went completely sideways. The hire company delivered thirty chairs instead of one hundred and thirty, the celebrant lost her folder, and the photographer turned up two hours late. Nobody noticed, because someone had stayed up the night before rewriting every supplier's arrival window by hand and had a backup plan for the backup plan. That experience, frustrating as it was, became our founding method: assume nothing, double-check everything, and stay close enough to your couple that they never feel alone.
Since then the studio has grown from a single planner into a full team spanning planning, floral design, styling and on-the-day coordination. We still refuse to run more than two weddings on any weekend, because doing less well has always been more valuable to us than doing more badly. It means our clients get genuine attention, our suppliers get clear briefs, and our installers get to leave a room exactly how it should look, not just how it looks with thirty minutes to spare.
2008 — The First Wedding
Aisle & Arbor coordinates its first wedding, for family, in the Dandenongs. Thirty chairs short and somehow a success.
2012 — Moving to Fitzroy
The studio opens its first permanent workshop and design space on Gertrude Street, a former textile warehouse.
2016 — Floral Studio Launched
Florals come in-house. The design team begins building full installations rather than outsourcing arrangements.
2020 — The Micro-Wedding Pivot
Thirty-eight weddings rescheduled in eleven weeks during the pandemic, and every single couple married before the year ended.
2025 — Eleven People Strong
The team now includes planners, florists, logisticians and installers, based at Collins Street in the Melbourne CBD.
Four things we will never do.
A wedding is a rare event, and small compromises compound. These are the lines we do not cross, regardless of budget or timeline.
No Double Bookings
We run a maximum of two weddings on any weekend so our planners can be present, not stretched.
No Hidden Commissions
Every supplier payment we receive is disclosed in writing and subtracted from your final invoice.
No Floral Foam
Every arrangement uses foam-free mechanics and composted green waste, without further adding to landfill.
No Autopilot Plans
Nothing is copy-pasted from the last wedding. Every couple gets a hand-built plan and run sheet.
Eleven people, one shared standard.
Most couples meet their lead planner within a week and their florist within a month. They stay with us from the first call to the final pack-down.
Marcus Whitlock-Pemberton
Founder & Lead PlannerSeventeen years of planning, with a former life as an event producer for touring musicians. Runs the planning side of the studio.
Ana Sofía Reyes
Senior PlannerHandles venue research and supplier negotiations, with a particular love for heritage buildings and long-table logistics.
Clara Bennett
Head of Floral DesignTrained in London and Floriade in the Netherlands. Leads the studio's seasonal, foam-free floral philosophy.
Tom Ishikawa
Logistics & Install ManagerOwns the install windows, the van schedule and the run sheet that every supplier actually reads and follows.
A small portfolio from the past twelve months.
A vineyard long table, a coastal winter wedding, a warehouse ceiling installation and a rainforest ceremony. Every one run by our own team.
Coldstream Long Table
180 guests, a single 60-metre table and a marquee swapped in after morning rain.
Flinders Winter Ceremony
Coastal vows under a bare timber arch with smoked eucalyptus and 84 guests.
Fitzroy Warehouse Reception
Fourteen suspended floral clouds over 130 seated guests, installed in 51 minutes.
Dandenong Rainforest Vows
A fern-framed ceremony for 46 guests with a shuttle plan for three waterfall walk-ins.
How the studio actually runs day to day.
Every wedding has a dedicated lead planner and a named backup, so someone is always available if a personal emergency takes your primary planner off the schedule. That backup reads every email thread from the first enquiry, attends at least two planning calls and is briefed on your run sheet at least four weeks out. Couples never have to worry that their planner is the single point of failure.
On the admin side, we run our own planning software with a shared live hub for each couple. Mood boards, quotes, invoices, supplier contacts and run sheets all sit in one place, and every entry has a timestamp. If a question comes up two years later, we can answer it in a minute, not a week. There are no spreadsheets emailed back and forth and no lost versions.
- A named lead planner and a named backup for every wedding
- One live planning hub covering all suppliers, quotes and timelines
- Two check-in calls a month, plus a WhatsApp thread for the small stuff
- Every supplier briefed on the run sheet three weeks before the wedding
The projects we are quietly proud of.
Not the biggest weddings, just the ones that tested the studio and made us better at what we do.
The Eleven-Week Reschedule
Thirty-eight weddings rescheduled in eleven weeks during the pandemic. Every one of them ran before the year ended, with new venues, new suppliers and new guest lists.
The 60-Metre Table
A single continuous table for 180 guests at a Yarra Valley vineyard, designed, built and installed in one day after the original marquee plan was abandoned.
The Foam-Free Census
The team removed floral foam from every installation and published the studio's process openly. Within a year, four other Melbourne florists had followed.
Reviews from the last two years.
They rewrote our entire run sheet forty-eight hours out when the photographer changed arrival times. Nobody panicked, nothing slipped, and we genuinely did not hear about it until after the wedding.
Clara's florals were the reason people kept talking about our wedding months later. The installation looked like it had grown there, and it was all foam-free, which genuinely mattered to us.
Two planners on the day meant nothing sat idle. My mum noticed it first, and she is impossible to impress.
Notes from the studio desk.
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Read ArticleOur services, in plain terms.
Two specialisms, one studio, one set of standards. Most couples start with planning and add styling later once the venue is locked, but both services stand on their own.