¡Dios Mio!

Check out this gorgeous shot from our wedding photographer Aaron Thompson. He snapped it at a recent wedding reception at Casa Guadalajara in Old Town's Bazaar del Mundo. How fun does this look?

And just imagine all the fun ways you could play off the setting. Loteria card-inspired invitations (the photo below is of Loteria-inspired table place cards, via Style Me Pretty).

Plus, it'd be a great place to break out this cake topper by Skull Queen. JT and I loved the idea of using this cake topper, back when we were considering this venue as a possible reception site.

They don't post their full catering information online, but based on the prices at the restaurant itself, you could probably have a pretty festive yet cost effective shindig at Casa Guadalajara.

Cool Venue Option: Condor's Nest Ranch

Trying to help my recently engaged friend come up with some unique wedding venue options (she, too, is not a fan of the whole hotel-ballroom-thing), I stumbled across this venue. It didn't really work for the style of event that she and her fiance had in mind, but it was so darn cool, that I just had to share it with the world!

The Condor's Nest Ranch is way up in the northeast corner of the county, just shy of Temecula, really. It is the perfect mix of kitschy and down home farm, perfect for a hipster barbecue wedding!

What I loved most after checking out their website was not only how cute it was (I mean, that helps, a LOT!) but also the affordability and all the options for crafting your event. Their pre-planned packages break down to basically $100 per person, but that amount includes everything you could ever possibly need for a wedding, including food, beverages, bartenders, tables, linens, a DJ, all venue fees, set-up and clean up, lighting...it's a pretty darn good deal!

And if the pre-packaged plan isn't your thing, you can mix and match and play with all of their options a la carte, too. Even their menu has limitless options, ranging from super cute BBQ style (peach cobbler, at a wedding? I love it!) to rack of lamb to kobe beef sliders to tapas!

There's rooms for you and your family or guests to stay in overnight, and with no neighbors within earshot, your party really can go all night! And bonus points for the fact that the property is running over with adorable animals, from peacocks to llamas.

If I had found this place sooner during my planning process, it would have been a major contender!

Guest Blog: Laura and the Great Venue Search

I'm still across the coast, in the state that they claim is for lovers, so for today's post, I'm very pleased to welcome guest blogger Laura! Laura is a good friend who recently got engaged and is just starting to begin planning her wedding. I hope having another bride's perspective on the process will be helpful and entertaining!

For my fiance and me, one of the first steps in planning our wedding is finding a great venue. We really want to pick a spot that had a lot of personal meaning for us. We're also not religious, and since that means we won't be having a church ceremony, we wanted to find a place where we could hold the ceremony and reception in the same area.

My first venue idea was a local organization I'd contacted earlier in the year for a birthday party rental. While the birthday party didn't end up taking place there, I still had their price list and was excited to set up a meeting with their event staff. When I contacted the event coordinator, however, I was given a whole new price list, the special "wedding" price list. Basically, because the event was now a wedding, their venue rental went up by 30% along with other misc. charges. Sadly, the price increase didn't come with any new perks either. I have to admit I was tempted to say it was a birthday party and I'd just happen to be wearing a white dress ;)

For some couples, the idea of paying extra to hold their wedding in a meaningful place might be just fine. For my fiance and me, however, we opted not to. We're leaning toward another local venue that has a flat fee for birthdays, company parties, and weddings.

Here are some of the resources for cost-savvy SD venues that we've been using:

- The City of San Diego website. They have this wonderful list of parks and other public areas that are popular for wedding sites: of parks and recreation areas. Best of all? They’re super cheap.

-The Balboa Park website. It’s not as detailed, but still gives some good ideas. The site also lists all the museums/venues in Balboa Park, and you can contact the venues individually for their rental options.

Check back soon for Laura's summary of the San Diego Bridal Bazaar (with pictures)!

Ceremony Site: More Marston House Details

I'm so thrilled with our venues. When my sister was here and we took her to see both of them, it just reinforced how much I love them.

I've seen photos of weddings at the Marston House online, but I thought I'd approach how we lay out our ceremony with a completely blank slate. Since my sister had never seen this place before, she was the perfect person to help us figure out the layout without any preconceived notions.

It happened that on the Saturday afternoon that we went by the garden, a wedding had just finished up. Most people set up their chairs facing this wall, using the fountain-turned-planter as their alter. But this particular wedding was set up to face the canyon.

The wall looks pretty bare right now, but in the Fall it is covered in vines and blooms.

This little structure will be perfect for the string trio to sit under (they request that they be provided with shade during outdoor weddings to protect the instruments. Bet you didn't know that!).

We decided that we will break with the set up patterns we have seen before and face the house. It's such a beautiful backdrop, and again, in the Fall, the flower beds right in front will be nearly 4 feet high with blooms.

One of my favorite hidden features about the Marston House garden is the little "waiting room." OK, it's not really a room...it's a gardener's station, but it's enclosed behind a separate wall, which makes it the ideal place for me to hide while guests are getting settled. Then, the bridal party and I can emerge from this door as we begin our march down the aisle!

J'adore Bleu Boheme

JT, my sister, and I met with the fantastic Bleu Boheme folks today to start going over details (menus, timelines, decor, etc.). Each time we go back, I love our venue more and more! Here are some photos I shot today. Hopefully you can see why we love it so much.

This is the main dining room.

The brick end of the room will be the "dance floor" area.

And finally, here's my niece enjoying herself while the grown ups talk business.

Venue Ideas: The Linkery

As you know, JT and I have decided on our venue and are quite pleased with it. However, I'd still like to share some of the other places that we considered when we began hunting. Just because they weren't right for us doesn't mean they won't be right for someone else, and obviously there's something special about each place, otherwise we wouldn't have ever considered them.

The Linkery is a fantastic farm-to-table restaurant in North Park. We've been fans since it first opened up in the smaller location back on the corner or 30th & Upas. Now that they've moved into larger digs, it's even better!

For the quality of the food, I find the prices to be totally reasonable. And if you are a beer lover, then you will never want to leave. There beer menu dwarfs their food menu significantly.

With the overall earthiness of both the red and brown decor and the culinary philosophy, we thought this was a great potential venue. However, they don't do full venue buyouts. They can seat 80 in the regular dining section, but in the interest of keeping true to their regular customers, the front seating area would still be open to the public. But if your party is smaller, they have a private dining room in the back that can accommodate up to 40. Too small for what we wanted to do, but since we love their food so much (and their philosophies on dining in general), we will probably be using this for our rehearsal dinner!

Venue Winner: Bleu Boheme

I had intended to blog about all of the other venue runners-up before telling you about the winner. But many of you have already heard (from me) that we've booked Bleu Boheme, and I'm sure you're eager to hear more about it.

Bleu Boheme is a French restaurant in the Kensington neighborhood of San Diego. It's rustic countryside French, not "fussy" French -- the menu is populated by peasant favorites like boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin. Since we're both huge foodies, you know it's delicious! I personally thought the duck confit that we had the last time we were there was out of this world.

The decor is, as JT's sister-in-law expertly put it, both elegant and adorable. There are huge chalkboards lining the walls with the day's menu. The walkway from the bar area to the dining room is made out of corks. The whole vibe was perfect, and led us to the "bohemian chic" theme that will be our wedding.

Some of the other major selling points were the cost and the helpful staff. Because we are having the reception during the day, the minimum food charge is super low. And there is no bar minimum -- we're just charged for what is consumed (which can be regulated a bit by what you choose to have them stock). The dining room can seat 80 snuggly, which is perfect for us. We wanted to keep it around 70-80, but we didn't want everyone sitting in a giant room where the tables are 10 feet apart from each other. Tight room = more interaction, more fun! The bar area will have some extra seating for the cocktail hour, which will be cleared during the meal for a dance floor afterwards.


Plus, Alana in the events department has been fantastic to work with so far. She's made it a breeze, offering to let us adjust the menus however we see fit, suggesting that we plug our Ipod into their sound system rather than having a DJ (gee, she read my mind!). We couldn't believe how much Bleu Boheme ended up being exactly what we were looking for!

The Great Venue Search: The Tractor Room

The Tractor Room is another awesomely offbeat option for a memorable reception. The interior is sort of "nouveau hunting lodge," and the menu has lots of game dishes (like buffalo, boar and venison) to match. I've really enjoyed both the food and the cocktail menu on the times I've visited.

It wouldn't work out for us, though. Once again, space was an issue. Though I tend to think of 80 guests as being a small reception, the Tractor Room can't accomodate that many in their dining room and would have to spill the seating out on to the patio. So if you've got an even smaller group with an adventurous palette, give them a ring. Their pricing structure was pretty affordable as well.

The Great Venue Search: El Camino

El Camino is a quirky, hipster, Mexicana-themed restaurant in South Park, which also happens to be our hood. It's flooded with pink lighting, there's vinyl graphics of mariachis on the walls, and a couple of TV monitors are continuously running movies where luchadors are the main characters. JT and I thought this would make a really creative venue possibility...our minds raced with ideas of sugar skull favors, Dia de los Muertos inspired cake toppers, and loteria cards as save-the-dates.

The upside: An affordable menu, between $30-40 per person. The downside: The place would be a very, very tight fit for our 80 guests. And though we think the theme is pretty damn cool, our more conservative extended family (especially those that did not spend their formative years in southern California) might not find the Virgin Mary and Jesus lights on the wall to be as amusing as we do.

Restaurant Reception 101

So the fiance and I liked the idea of having our reception at a restaurant for several reasons, one of the most important ones being cost - a restaurant would already have all the necessary tables, chairs, dishes, etc., therefore we wouldn't have to rent much of anything. When looking to book a restaurant for a wedding reception, there are a lot of different ways you can go. If you're thinking of doing the same, here are some things to keep in mind.

The full-venue buyout: If you're looking at a small restaurant without a lot of large private dining rooms, you'll probably need to buyout the whole venue. We talked to a few small to medium sized restaurants, and for a Saturday night, we were quoted on average between $8,500 to $13,500 to buyout the place for the evening. For some places, this only included food. For some, the minimum could be met through a combination of food and bar. For all, there is an additional service charge (usually 20%) and tax on top of that.

The daytime option: One money saving tip that my fiance's brother and sister-in-law passed along to us was to ask the restaurants if they would be open to letting us have a daytime reception instead of evening, especially if the restaurant isn't typically open for lunch. This way, they can still open for dinner and don't lose any dinner business. The minimum will be much lower, and some might not even ask you to meet a minimum at all.

Understanding the restaurant's priorities: Some of the places we contacted hadn't ever been approached to host a reception before, while some had hosted several in the past. For one venue, they weren't keen on the idea of closing down the restaurant to their regular customers. And hey, you can't blame them for wanting to put their loyal customers first! For another, I just couldn't seem to get them interested in helping me. They responded to my initial inquiry with an enthusiastic "yeah, we'd love to host your reception!" but then failed to return my subsequent calls and emails. While I get that not everyone thinks that my wedding is their number one priority, it is my wedding...and having to work with someone who didn't at least make me feel like I was a priority would get old fast.

The Great Venue Search: Museum of Contemporary Art

I had known for quite some time that San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) held weddings at their La Jolla facility. I had also heard that their rental fees were quite pricey (I can't confirm it, but someone once told me that for the full museum in La Jolla, the fee is at least $6,000). A cool place, for sure, but that whole La Jolla beachside vibe never quite seemed to pair well with a contemporary art museum. However, a couple of years ago, they opened a gallery space downtown. So, I gave them a ring to check out the rooms available for rental in the downtown facility.

There are two space that would be available on the date we were looking at: the Figi Family Concourse (an outdoor space) for $3,500, and the Berglund Room & Terrace for $2,000. We're only looking for a space to accomodate about 80 guests, so the Figi concourse, while lovely, would have been to big.

The Berglund Room & Terrace was just about the right size. The downside? The $2,000 rental fee pretty much just gets you the room (they can also provide chairs, an event manager at the reception, etc), but it's pretty much a blank space.

While that means that there's a lot of potential things that you could do visually, that also meant that we would need to get lots of rentals (tables, linens, lights) on top of the catering and bar...you can see how this could quickly become very expensive. So if your budget is a little less prohibitive, I say check it out. Bonus points that their staff was super helpful.

The Great Venue Search: Introduction

Deciding where to have our reception has been an incredibly daunting task, for reasons that I didn't quite expect. We had what we thought was a great idea right off the bat: find a restaurant that we already love, both in food and appearance, and have it there. The benefit would be twofold...first, our guests and we would not be forced to choke down the same bland chicken that every hotel would serve. Secondly, if we chose a restaurant with a very distinct atmosphere that was already heavily decorated, this would save us money on decor, florals, etc.

So...we figured we made a list of our favorite restaurants in town, but we figured we could find some additional research online or in local wedding related magazines. No such luck. Frankly, if one more person asks us if we have considered the Bali Hai hotel for our reception, it might be the last sentence they ever utter. No boring hotel ballrooms. Seriously.

I had hoped that we would be able to find more about individual venues online - what their maximum capacity is, what the minimum cost is for a Saturday reception (which, for most restaurants, would mean a full venue buyout), etc. But since none of that information was anywhere to be found (at least in most cases), we simply had to start calling and emailing blindly. And it is with great enthusiasm that I share the results of my venue searches with you. Even though only one of these places will ultimately work out for us, maybe one of them will work out for you!