Finding a Place to Host this Thang: Part 2

In my last post, I recounted the heartbreaks I incurred through venue searching. First I had to just say no to a downtown Chicago loft wedding, and then I had to say sayonara to the suburban version of an urban loft wedding. If you recall my 3 criteria for the perfect wedding reception venue, you’ll notice that I was quite litrally out of options:

1. No banquet halls or hotel ballrooms, especially not anything that was last updated in the 90s.
2. There needed to be windows in the actual reception room, and access to the outdoors was a plus.
3. It must have an urban loft vibe to it.

Personal photo

This is my "at my wits end" face

I went back to the drawing board (or the Google doc, if we’re being literal) and revamped my list. I started looking at hotel ballrooms and banquet halls, even ones that hadn’t been updated since the 90s, even ones that had a marquee near the road saying “Congrats Kurt and Trudy.” I looked at country clubs, museums, outdoor/tent receptions, even restaurants. I looked at expensive places and cheap places, places that considered bread and butter to be one of the courses in their 5-course meal package, places that include a single carnation on each table as the centerpiece, and places that would throw in a chocolate fountain for free, just for me (but don’t tell anyone). I looked at places near my house, near Mr. Unicycle’s parents’ house, near the airport, near my office, and beyond--pretty much a 15 mile radius from as far southeast as Chicago to as far northwest as this place.

Screen capture from Bing Maps

This shows approximations of where a bunch of venues I considered were located. But they're not exact. I literally just stuck a pin on different towns.

My Google doc had about 20 venues in it, and that’s not including the super-expensive/amazing ones I nixed in my last post. I ended up actually visiting about 18 of them, and by the end of it, I was so sick of hearing about butler-passed hors-d’oeuvres and toasting flutes that I was ready to elope. And here’s a tip, wedding industry: stop using the word “exquisite.” Every venue I saw had an “exquisite package” and they all promised to make my wedding into an "exquisite celebration." Of course, their idea of “exquisite” was horrible geometric-patterned carpet, cheesy uplighting, and draping on the head table. Gag me with a knife, banquet halls.

Image source

This is what I think of when I think of an exquisite wedding. I so need this.

That’s not to say that I think weddings in banquet halls are complete cheese (not enough to put on a sandwich at least). But the places I looked at seemed like they hadn’t changed much in the past 20 years. I felt like I’d have to wear puffy sleeves if I held my wedding there. Let’s just say these venues probably still haven’t been introduced to mason jar centerpieces and mustaches on sticks.

Image source

But they've probably seen this dress before

At the end of my venue visits, Mr. Unicycle and I narrowed it down to our top 3 contenders: Mission Hills Golf Club, Poplar Creek Country Club, and Seasons of Long Grove. As you can see if you Google mapped them, none of these are even remotely close to each other.

We made a pros and cons list for each venue, assigned each pro a positive value and each con a negative value, according to how important/detrimental each was to us. Then we let Google docs do its thang and tell us which venue to pick. Here’s a sampling of what our list looked like:

Mission Hills: they’d let us decorate to our hearts’ desire, they didn’t host any other events at the same time, and had an outdoor cocktail hour setup. The cons: It was the most expensive of our top 3 and the farthest from the church, plus Mr. Unicycle thought it looked kind of like a supper club.

Image from Mission Hills site

Poplar Creek: They had the best looking room of the 3 with a balcony that guests could use, and they were also the cheapest. They also had a really sweet outdoor cocktail hour area that was brand new. The cons: They had other events going on at the same time, and we’re not allowed to hang anything from the walls (if we wanted to hang stuff from the ceilings, we had to let them do it and pay a fee). Plus, the package was only for 5 hours instead of the standard 6.

Image source

Seasons of Long Grove: Long Grove is a whimsical, historic village full of great photo ops, and I thought our guests would love the idea of attending a wedding there. Plus they had amazing food (that they let us taste fo' free when we visited), the coordinator was super nice, and--the best part!!--Chiavari chairs were the standard! The cons: I didn’t really like the look of the room for our wedding. It was a very cute room and it would be perfect for a wedding shower or a more vintage-y wedding. But it was the exact opposite of my original urban loft idea. We also would have to have the dance floor outside, which means the old folks would probably all stay inside in the air conditioning.

Image from Seasons of Long Grove site

So which one did I pick? Stay tuned...

How did you end up deciding on a venue? Did you do a “statistical analysis” or are you more old skool?