The team
Ceri owns it and runs it, Tomos cooks, Lowri coordinates the weddings Ceri does not, and eleven people from the villages around set up, serve, pour and clear. Whoever answers the phone has stood in the Barn at midnight with a radio.
Owner and coordinator. The viewings, the plan, the day
Grew up in the farmhouse next door and bought the barn back from the family in 2015, having spent fifteen years running hotel weddings in Cardiff and Bath and a list of everything she would do differently. Restored it over two years, opened in 2017, and runs most weddings herself with Lowri. The timeline, the radio and the plan for the rain are hers.
Head chef. The kitchen, the tastings, the menu
Cooked in Bristol and at a two-rosette place in the Brecon Beacons before Ceri persuaded him that feeding 180 people the same very good dinner at once was more interesting than feeding twelve. Buys lamb from the farm up the lane and vegetables from the Usk valley, does every tasting himself, and cuts the cake.
The rest of us
Came from a Cardiff events company in 2019 and runs about half the weddings. The timeline template, the supplier site sheet and the rain plan laminated to the Snug wall are hers.
Tomos and four cooks, two of them here since the opening. A pastry cook on Saturdays. They plate 180 covers in eleven minutes, which Tomos times, and feed the band.
Six front-of-house from Llanover, Usk and Abergavenny, most of them students home for the summer who come back every year. Two behind the bar, one on the door, three on the tables.
Ceri's brother farms the land round the barn. He grits the lane, lights the fire pit, tows the car that parked on the Meadow in the rain, and supplies the lamb.
The barn
Ty Mawr means the big house, though it was never a house: a threshing barn for the farm, roofless by the time Ceri was a child and used for storing fencing. The restoration in 2015 to 2017 put a new oak roof on the old stone, floors with heating under them, a kitchen in the old dairy and twelve bedrooms in the stables, and kept the cart doors, the owl hole and the dates scratched into the lintel. We take seventy events a year here and close in January to mend things.
The six stopsThe enquiry form has a date picker and takes two minutes; Ceri replies within the working day with a viewing if the date is free and two honest alternatives if it is not. Viewings are an hour, Tuesday to Saturday, at the time of day your ceremony would be.