3 Creative Barn Wedding Decorating Ideas For A Rustic Celebration

What’s the most essential feature of a barn wedding, the reason you’d choose to have one in the first place? 

Is it the exposed wooden beams and weathered wooden features that lend so much character and charm to the venue? 

Or maybe it’s the way you can play with the lighting within that captivatingly bucolic space. 

Well, these are both true, and they share something in common: a closeness to a simpler, more rural, and self-sufficient lifestyle of ages past. 

And that’s what you base your barn wedding decorating ideas on. 

Whatever things you come up with, you want them to, in some way, embody or relate to that vision.

1. Create a Rustic Entrance For Your Barn Wedding

As we mentioned, the central concept of a barn wedding often draws on a deep-rooted nostalgia and yearning for simpler times gone by.

The truth is that we Americans mostly don’t live the way we used to. 

There’s no more Wild West or pioneers trekking across the continent in covered wooden wagons. 

Only around 2% of Americans still have anything to do with farming, most of which is industrial and impersonal these days. 

And virtually none of us really know where the majority of what we eat comes from or what it contains. 

Given all that, it’s not hard to understand why we all have occasional yearnings for bygone days that we never even experienced ourselves. 

Modern life is comfortable in many ways, but it’s also frequently incredibly stressful and unsatisfying in others. 

That’s precisely what you use as inspiration for your barn wedding decorating ideas, like this one.

Feeling nostalgia for a time you never lived in is similar to feeling homesick for a place you’ve never been. 

It’s a fantasy on some level, but not one without any basis in reality. 

You can help your guests enter into that fantasy by creating a physical portal for them to walk through, transporting them from their modern urban world to your wedding space. 

The reality is that most of them are not going to become farmers like Dorothy’s family in The Wizard of Oz. 

But you’re probably not going to wear your wedding dress every day for the rest of your life either. 

It’s ok to dream a little and indulge in a little bit of fantasy and roleplay once in a while. 

And it’s easier to do that when there’s actually a physical barrier or marker between the “real” world and the fantasy space.

After all, there’s a reason movie theaters, casinos, haunted houses, and other places that run on fantasy typically have impressive outer doors but no windows or clocks.

Pro Tip: If you can, create your entrance portal using rural-themed or natural local materials, such as tree branches, deer antlers, horseshoes, etc.

2. Barn Wedding Backdrop Ideas

Many of the barn wedding decorating ideas you might come up with will have something to do with your backdrop, so we’ll cover that now. 

Your entrance portal serves as a physical transition between the outside modern world and the semi-fantastical space where you’ll have your ceremony. 

Then, once they’ve entered the space and allowed themselves to indulge a bit in the fantasy, your backdrop helps them stay there. 

Just like a theme park, a religious building, or any other place designed to be set apart from the ordinary, mundane outside world, your ceremony space is special and different. 

You probably don’t live in a barn, and you probably wouldn’t be in one under normal circumstances, but that’s the whole point.

Whether you’re going with a Wild West theme, a Wizard of Oz theme, or some other barn-adjacent theme, give yourself permission to lean all the way into it. 

A wedding ceremony is itself a kind of spiritual ritual conducted in a way that we don’t generally conduct the majority of our ordinary affairs outside of the sacred space. 

And if you’re already engaging in at least a little transcendent and even whimsical thinking and visualization anyway, why not add a few extra touches to deepen the experience? 

As long as you stick to the fundamentals, you’re sure to design something captivating. 

But if you don’t want to do it all yourself, you can also hire a wedding planner or even a set designer to handle it for you. 

Someone who makes backdrops and props for stage plays can just as easily make them for weddings, too.

3. Rustic Accessories That Complete Your Barn Wedding Decor

So you’ve got your portal and your backdrop all set up, but it still feels like there’s an awful lot of empty space. 

Well, you don’t need to just keep building more backdrops or portals to fill it up. 

Instead, try populating that space with additional accessories and props that match and blend well with both your portal and backdrop.  

Depending on the particular theme you’re going with, these could be anything from cow bells, saddles, belt buckles, and cow skulls to sparkly red shoes, giant sunflowers, and yellow bricks (if you’re going for a Wizard of Oz look). 

The important thing, as with all barn wedding decorating ideas, is to ensure that your props and accessories match and complement the scenery you’ve set up. 

Hay bales, antique watering cans, and even old railroad spikes harmonize well with the aesthetic of a wooden barn. 

By contrast, LED welcome signs, disco balls, and other stuff like that might clash with the “nostalgia for the rustic past” vibes that you’re probably going for.

Side Note: The Wizard of Oz theme works wonderfully with barn venues, and we genuinely don’t understand why so few couples do it.

Bringing Your Barn Wedding Decorating Ideas Together

Here’s the part where we say we’d love to keep sharing more about all the different barn wedding decorating ideas that we’ve seen and tried, but we’re out of room on this page. 

So, we’ll need to wrap things up for now. 

But if you’ve got any questions or you’d like to learn more about our venue and/or others in this area, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. 

We’re here to help, and we always love to play any small role we can in making sure engaged couples get all that they’re looking for from their wedding experience.