The Venue

The first thing we did when we set a date was start looking for venues. I naively thought that this would be quite a simple task. I was wrong. I didn't feel that my demands of a venue were too diva-ish, I didn't want manicured lawns with a cluster of white peacocks or a fairytale castle with a moat and working drawbridge just somewhere nice with a modern, simply decorated interior that had lots of bedrooms or a hotel nearby. I should also mention that we didn't want a church wedding and so ideally wanted a venue where we could hold the ceremony, the wedding breakfast and evening reception because we are getting married in October in England and so weather will probably be against us. However, even with this requirement there are still a lot of places licensed to hold weddings.

I was so excited to start looking up venues on the internet, check out wedding packages and go through menus. I was even more excited to start visiting places but it soon became clear (somewhere between the 20th and 30th venue) that our dream wedding venue was just that, a dream. Ceremony and reception rooms were either too big or too small, venues too expensive, came with too many conditions (one we would have had to pay for all the rooms in the hotel!) or didn't have enough bedrooms. One of the main issues I had was the decoration, the repeat offender being hideously multi-coloured carpet and equally hideous mismatching wallpaper. I know, this might seem like a trivial issue but when you are probably going to have all your photos taken inside you don't want the floor being centre of attention. A lot of the places would have been fine just to have as a wedding breakfast/reception location but the issue really was that we wanted a nice room to get married in as well.

After months of searching and nearly giving up hope we went to see one final venue that we had previously ruled out for being too expensive. As soon as we stepped inside into the 14th Century reception hall with its stained glass windows and big roaring fire I knew it was the one. My fiancé and I walked round with the wedding co-ordinator with our jaws nearly on the floor! It was just perfect, a beautiful old stately home set in 65 acres of countryside overlooking a lake and that had recently undergone a multi-million pound refurbishment meaning that it was all nicely done up inside with no horrible carpet in site - hurrah! The room that we are getting married in has the added bonus of three huge chandeliers going down the middle, it is just beautiful. It will also be fantastic if we have to have photos inside as there are so many indoor photo opportunities. Best of all... they do a really good value wedding package for out of season weddings! Perfect!

And so... the winner is... (drumroll)... Barcelo Walton Hall! Here are some pictures :) sorry they are a bit small but they are from the venue website and are the only ones they have one there. The room shown is the one that we are getting married in and having the wedding breakfast in.

 
How have you found venue hunting?