Garden inspiration

Sisal carpet over custom flooring lays the foundation for a botanical wedding.

Nashville, Tenn., may be known as Music City, but in the early 20th Century, it was also home to the family behind good-to-the-last-drop Maxwell House coffee. After selling the brand in the 1920s, the Cheek family built the Cheekwood Mansion on 100 acres of woodland in west Nashville. Today, the mansion and grounds are home to the Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art—a popular location for weddings and society events.

For an April wedding at this lush site, Liberty Party Rental of Nashville and Hendersonville installed three tents and more than 6,500 square feet of custom flooring.

“The event was located on a grassy field behind the Cheekwood Mansion,” says Alyssa DiCicco, Liberty Party Rental marketing and design manager. “In order to get to the field, our staff had to drive trucks up a narrow dirt road to the top of a hill. If it rained, work had to be suspended due to mud and difficulty driving up the dirt path in a truck.”

Liberty installed a 40-by-105-foot clear-top frame tent for 250 guests for the dining portion of the reception, and a 40-by-40-foot clear-top frame tent served as space for dancing. An additional 20-by-30-foot frame tent was installed for catering. Liberty Party Rental applied for the tent permit along with fire marshal approval for the tent installation.

The dinner and dance tents featured custom flooring and seagrass/sisal carpeting, with stairs leading from the tents to a grassy expansion, providing guests with access to the beautiful Cheekwood gardens.

“The seagrass carpet had to be stretched out on site for a day before attaching it to the floor, which allowed for a smoother surface without ripples,” DiCicco says.

The installation process took about a week to complete. The flooring required the first two days to install (Monday and Tuesday), with laser-leveling instruments helping to speed up the process of installing over unlevel ground. The tents went up on Wednesday, and Liberty staff installed the carpeting on Thursday—leaving plenty of time for event planner H Three Events, also of Nashville, to oversee the addition of other event rentals and decor before the Saturday celebration.

Liberty was well prepared for the challenges of this installation, as the company has worked at this site before.

“Each year we install the flooring for the Swan Ball—the grand dame of Nashville society events—which is a much larger flooring installation,” DiCicco says.