The forty-five minutes everyone forgets to book
The ceremony ends, the doors open, and everyone drifts toward drinks and canapés. Behind them, a room that held chairs in rows needs to become one that holds tables and a dance floor. This is the turnaround, and it is almost always under-scheduled.
The mistake is treating it as dead time — a gap that fills itself. It doesn't. The crew stripping the chairs, rolling them to storage, unfolding tables, dressing linens, setting glassware, placing centrepieces, and positioning the top table has a fixed minimum speed, and that speed is set by the room size, the number of staff, and the weight of the furniture.
A typical room for a hundred guests — ceremony rows out, round dinner tables in — takes a crew of four to six people somewhere between forty-five minutes and an hour to turn properly. Smaller venues may be faster; rooms where chairs must leave the building entirely and tables must arrive from an adjacent store take longer. What the turnaround cannot do is compress indefinitely because the couple extended the ceremony reading or photographs ran over.
This is why the drinks reception exists as a structural element, not just a social one. It is the scheduled slack that absorbs the turnaround. Forty-five minutes of canapés on the lawn sounds like hospitality; it is actually buffer built into the architecture of the afternoon. Shorten it and you either rush the crew or hold guests at the doors. Neither is elegant.
A few things help. A venue with a separate holding area — a foyer, a terrace, a garden — means guests genuinely cannot drift back early. A dedicated turnaround coordinator, even just a confident member of the venue's team with a radio, keeps the process honest. And the run-sheet should name the turnaround explicitly: start time, target completion, a check five minutes before guests are called in to confirm centrepieces are placed and no empty linen-trolley is still visible.
The room will look ready long before it actually is. Doors closed until it truly is ready — that small discipline is worth more than any decoration inside.