Hamptons Wedding Venues We Love to Photograph
The Hamptons stretch roughly 30 miles along the South Fork of Long Island, and within that corridor you'll find some of the most varied and visually compelling wedding venues on the East Coast. We've photographed weddings and engagements across the East End for years, from the open meadows of Water Mill to the tip of Long Island at Montauk. Below is an honest guide to the venues we return to again and again, and what makes each one worth your consideration.
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill
Address: 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, NY 11976
The Parrish Art Museum is one of the most architecturally distinctive venues in the Hamptons. Designed by Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron and opened in its current Water Mill location in 2012, the building draws its form from a traditional artist's studio: two long parallel wings joined by a central spine, illuminated by skylights that shift with the hour and the season. From the outside, it reads almost like a contemporary barn. Inside, the galleries are sky-lit and spacious.
For photography, the venue offers a rare mix of interior texture and exterior light. The wraparound terrace looks out over the neighboring Duck Walk Vineyards, and the surrounding 14-acre property includes meadows and low woodland that frame the structure on every side. The Hamptons has long been known for a particular quality of light, soft, diffused, and close to the horizon, and the Parrish was literally sited to catch it. Early evening here is exceptional. The golden hour comes on gradually, and the open grounds give us room to work with it.
The museum offers multiple event spaces including the lobby, the theater, the galleries, and the outdoor terrace, with capacity for up to 300 guests. It's a venue that suits couples who want their wedding to feel like an event, curated and considered, without being conventional. The architecture does the heavy lifting. Florals and decor have space to breathe here rather than competing with ornate interiors.
Topping Rose House, Bridgehampton
Address: 1 Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, Bridgehampton, NY 11932
Topping Rose House is a 22-room boutique hotel in the heart of Bridgehampton built around a restored 19th-century Greek Revival farmhouse. The property is owned by Simon Critchell and Bill Campbell, and the design reflects their sensibility: modern, natural, and quietly luxurious. The Jean-Georges restaurant anchors the ground floor, and the wraparound porch, garden grounds, and pool area all flow naturally into wedding use.
What we love about Topping Rose photographically is its intimacy. This is not a sprawling resort. It's a house that happens to be a hotel, and it photographs that way. Getting-ready images have warmth here. The porch and garden are naturally framed for portraits. The rooms and suites allow the bridal party to be together in a real environment rather than a generic ballroom anteroom.
Because the property has guest rooms and suites to accommodate the wedding party and closest guests, weddings here often have a weekend-long quality: a rehearsal dinner at the Jean-Georges restaurant, a morning-after breakfast, guests who never have to leave. That continuity shows in the images. When everyone is relaxed and present, it reads in the photographs.
Topping Rose is best suited to intimate celebrations. The scale of the property naturally caps the guest count, which is part of its appeal. Couples who choose this venue tend to prioritize the quality of the experience over its size.
Gurney's Montauk Resort & Seawater Spa, Montauk
Address: 290 Old Montauk Highway, Montauk, NY 11954
Gurney's is in a category of its own. The resort sits directly on the Atlantic Ocean at the far eastern tip of Long Island, and its 1,000-foot private beach is the defining feature of any wedding held here. This is a venue where the landscape does something active. The ocean is present in nearly every image, whether you're working on the East Deck, the spa deck, or the beach itself.
The property has been a Montauk institution since the 1920s, and it has the bones to show for it while carrying a fully renovated interior. The event spaces include the East Deck with its panoramic ocean views, multi-level outdoor terraces, and over 25,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space. The oceanfront guest rooms and private residences mean the entire wedding party can stay on property, which turns a wedding into something closer to a destination weekend.
From a photography standpoint, Gurney's rewards patience. The Atlantic light at sunset, particularly from the upper decks, is dramatic in a way that few venues can match. The beach itself offers total visual simplicity: sky, water, couple. We've documented moments here that look like nothing else we shoot anywhere on the East Coast.
One thing worth noting: Montauk is technically not the Hamptons, though it shares the South Fork and its sensibility. Couples who choose Gurney's are usually choosing it specifically for the ocean, for the end-of-the-world feeling Montauk has always had, and for the weekend compound experience the resort enables so naturally.
The Bridge Golf Club, Bridgehampton
Address: 495 Millstone Road, Bridgehampton, NY 11932
The Bridge opened in 2002 on the site of the former Bridgehampton Auto Race Circuit, and that lineage is visible in the architecture. The modernist glass-and-steel clubhouse does not look like a traditional country club. It looks like something that arrived from a different design vocabulary entirely: angular, dramatic, intentional. The golf course itself features significant elevation changes across manicured grounds that offer a variety of portrait locations.
This is an exclusively private club, and weddings here carry that character. The guest list tends to be curated rather than large. The architectural interiors photograph with strong graphic lines and clean backgrounds that work particularly well for editorial-style portraits. Natural light enters generously through the glass facade.
If you are considering The Bridge for your wedding, the venue will speak clearly to whether it's right for you from the moment you visit. It does not try to be everything. It has a specific aesthetic, contemporary, bold, and rooted in a place with a deeply particular history, and weddings here reflect that.
East Hampton Beach, East Hampton
For couples who want an engagement session that is simply and completely the Hamptons, East Hampton Beach is where we bring them.
There is nothing to manage here architecturally. No venue aesthetic to work with or against, no structured spaces. It is open dune, open sky, and the Atlantic. The light on the beach in the late afternoon and early evening is the same light that drew painters to the East End for more than a century. It is soft in a way that doesn't require any work from us. We just have to be there.
We photograph engagement sessions here that belong in a completely different visual category from anything a venue can produce. When couples ask us what the Hamptons looks like through our lenses, this is often what we show them.
A Note on the Hamptons for Couples Planning from Outside the Region
The Hamptons wedding season runs primarily from late May through October, with June, September, and early October representing our personal favorites for light and weather. Summer weekends book quickly. Venues like these often close out 18 months or more in advance for peak July and August dates.
The East End is also genuinely geographic. Montauk is 30 miles east of Southampton, and traffic on a Friday afternoon in August is real. When you're planning, we encourage couples to think about where their guests are staying and how the day flows between locations. It affects not just logistics but the feeling of the day, and the feeling of the day is what we photograph.
If you're planning a wedding at any of these venues and want to talk through what photography looks like in these spaces, we'd love to hear from you.
Abby Jiu Photography is a destination wedding photography studio based in Washington, D.C. We photograph weddings across the Hamptons and throughout the Northeast, and we are available for travel worldwide.