*LadyJ10*

jelybeancg

Hi!
I saw on here that you had your wedding at Brantwyn Estate. FI & I have an appointment to tour there tonight. This is our fist venue tour. Any advice on what questions to ask? What did you like the most and also not like?

Thanks!

LadyJ10

Who are you meeting with? If you're meeting with Jenna, please tell her Paul and Jen from July said "Hi"! We had a great experience, but I had actually already been to the estate for events with my grandparents in the past, so I knew what to expect. Pretty much the biggest thing is to just get a feel for the location and space, and try to picture your event there. I really enjoyed the site visits, as it gave us a chance to talk about the "feel" we were going for with the entire event.

How large is your party? We had about 120 and ended up being split between the two dining rooms for dinner. If you have many more guests than that, I think you'll have to tent the upper garden to seat everyone for dinner! I understand they can also put a dance floor in the tent, but we really enjoyed having our DJ set up in the conservatory.

Will you be having the ceremony on-site? We had ours in the lower garden, and it poured the day of the wedding up until an hour before the ceremony. Luckily they were able to wait to make the call, and we ended up having it in the garden instead of inside -- it would have been a tight squeeze to get all of our guests in the one room for the ceremony if we had to, so maybe ask about other contingency plans in case of rain.

Do you have any family members who are members of the Country Club? My grandmother is and they gave us a small discount (which adds up when you are paying so much money).

Definitely have whoever you're meeting with walk you through the flow of the event when you're in the space. That helped me visualize where my guests would be and how everything would be set up!

Overall, what I liked the most about having our wedding at Brantwyn was the level of service/care from everyone on staff that was extended to us and all of our guests, the gorgeous building and grounds, and the fact that we could have everything in one location.

jelybeancg

Thanks for the info.! We are meeting with Jillian. We are expecting to invite 120 guests. I guess my main concern is having guests in 2 seperate rooms. Will guests not in the room where we sit feel like they are missing the action? I really want to avoid country clubs (although we are going to tour the country club as well tonight) and hotel ballrooms. I love the idea of mansions and historic places but I guess having guests in different rooms is all part of that. We will be getting married in church so this would just be for the reception. No one I know is a member, although I work for DuPont but as a contractor and I don't think contractors get any employee discount.

I also checked out your bio and I love Jennifer Childress' work!

LadyJ10

What we did to address the two different dining rooms issue was have a sweetheart table in each room -- we ate the first course in one room, moved to the second room for the second course, then back to the first for dessert. It worked well for us, honestly we weren't even sitting at our table(s) much, just enough to eat one quick bite, then be up again visiting, taking pictures, etc.

The other issue is where to do introductions, toasts, and the first dance. We did ours on the upper garden, which worked really well for the great weather. When you take a look at the conservatory (the one with the black and white floor) -- this is where we did our parent dances, and it was cramped for 120 people to try to see what's going on. I don't think it would have worked to have our intros and everything there.