Wedding Blog

Brock House:

A while back, my MOH and a BM and I went out and spied on a wedding (from afar!) at the one of the more well known wedding venues: Brock House, in Kitsilano, after a long day of trying on dresses. MOH is sipping on ice and looking fabulously candid as she’d gotten used to me snapping zillions of photos of them the whole day.

This is one of the most popular places to have your Vancouver wedding if the Croatian Cultural Center, old halls, and the aforementioned hotels and golf courses don’t float your boat. Disclaimer: I realize there are hundreds of brides that have fantastic weddings here year after year; I do believe it is a tried, tested, and true place - one of Vancouver’s best, but I really tried to dichotomize all my venues into pros and cons to gain better perspective.

(I just realized I got a tressle of my MOH’s gorgeous red hair in that last (admitedly overexposed) photo)

Here are some glamour shots:

Thanks to the wonder of flickr, I get to see real live wedding photos that highlight the downsides:

a) All photos will be taken with the sunlight from behind, and everyone’s digital photos are going to turn out underexposed….

b) People won’t be expectantly waiting for the bride to emerge from behind chapel doors - instead she will have a long walk across the grass from the house where everyone will see her coming from 60 feet back, and as she gets closer, the cars will appear in the backgrounds of their aforementioned digital photos. Not to mention the plastic on the outdoor tent which was one of the biggest deterrants for me. What function does it serve? To keep in heat? To keep out bugs? A chilly breeze? Now that I’m looking over their website again though, it actually costs $200 for the plastic!

c) No music after 10pm, and I believe the pay parking lot closes at 11pm. A Saturday summer night tent rental runs $2000 + $500 for the ceremony, plus their dj and their alcohol, and two weddings can happen at the same time - one indoors and one in the tent. Potentially four in one day since rentals are from 11am-4pm, which wasn’t an option for me, or 6:30 till 1 am. The ceremony could wrap at 7 if everything was on schedule…. perhaps there’d be time to get photos in, 7:30 dinner, the lighting here, below, will last 30 minutes tops…..

d) Not to mention that by 8pm (only 1.5 hours into the wedding) it will be getting dark. One of my visits to the place was on June 11th, 10 days or so away from the longest day of the year and it wasn’t the most picture perfect lighting outside at 8pm that night…..

Enter: Aberthau Heritage House
Perhaps a lesser known venue that is slightly more affordable, and just a stone’s throw from brock house is Aberthau (or the “West Point Grey Community Centre”). Lesser known indeed - I went around Jericho on three separate days and there was a wedding there each day. I drove to Aberthau twice, during a prime Saturday night in june and there may well have been tumbleweeds rolling by.

It can house 90 people for a sit down dinner with a one day rental fee hovering around $1000. Here’s a random flickr gallery I found that features a few photos of the place, but my impression was that it would be quite dim inside after the sun went down. One upside is I think you can pick your own catering company, whereas you have to use the in house catering at Brock House…