Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Search for a Venue: Part 2

Part 1

The second venue we looked at was the Indian Center, which is also downtown. We didn't know much about the building, but it met our requirements regarding capacity and open catering/alcohol. The building (which is actually a museum) looks like this:




We loved the location and the openness of the room - Especially the light that the huge windows let in! The set up is also really unique. I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but you walk in and you're on a platform that goes around half of the room looking down at the middle. It would make for some great pictures! David even had some ideas about decorating the upper level with pictures of us and having the guestbook table there. There were ramps going down to the lower part, which would have been necessary for my grandparents and to transport food. It was also much more open than the Garvey Center, which we both liked. It made it feel much bigger (well, and the fact that it WAS bigger helped) and the tables could be much more spread out.






Unfortunately, there were some things we didn't like. You can see in the second picture the flags hanging above the windows. The room is called the Gallery of Nations, so I definitely understand the importance and significance of the flags, but the red, yellow, and blue wouldn't exactly coordinate with the black, white, and pink theme we're going for. Also, they had gotten different chairs from the ones in the first picture and the new ones (if you can see them in the second picture) are gray folding chairs.

But really, neither of those things were hugely important to us. The thing that turned us off was the fact that we could only get in to decorate starting at 10 AM the day of the wedding. Not only is this a lot of added pressure for us, but this would put a lot of pressure on our parents and those helping us. I want that day to be as calm as possible, and because of my OCD tendancies, I couldn't just turn over decorating to anyone. I'm going to be putting a lot of hard work into the little details and I want to see them executed the way I imagined. Also, David emailed the coordinator there (whose name I will not mention) and she was less than friendly in her response. When he asked if there were any options where we could pay an extra fee to rent the space Friday evening, she replied with comments like, "I've seen plenty of receptions set up here in less than an hour," and, "It's amazing what you can do when you're put under pressure." While the first part may be true, there are definitely nicer ways to say that, and neither of us really appreciated being talked to like we were children. And on top of that, the point was we don't WANT to be under pressure.

So, unfortunately, that was a deal breaker for this venue. We decided to continue looking for something that we were totally satisfied with.

Was your venue search harder than you anticipated? Did you run into any wedding coordinators like that?

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