Corio Villa Wedding, Geelong

Corio Villa is a single-storey prefabricated cast iron house on Eastern Beach Road, Geelong, at the corner of Fitzroy Street, looking over Corio Bay. Its iron was cast in Edinburgh in 1855 to designs by the Glasgow architects Bell & Miller, shipped out in boxes and bolted together on site in 1856 after the original purchaser died before it arrived. Bluebell columns, lion-head keystones and fretwork bargeboards survive, and the Victorian Heritage Register calls it the only known surviving house of its kind in Australia.

The villa has stayed a private home through four owners since Alfred Douglass, a wool merchant, bought it, and the family who held it for most of the twentieth century hired the house and garden out for weddings and functions. Veri photographed a wedding shoot here, working the iron verandah and the lawn above the bay, with the Geelong waterfront and its pier part of the same afternoon.