Weddingbee Blog

When I was small, I watched a little flick called Father of the Bride. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

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Well, because I watched this movie incessantly, I’ve always wanted to have a wedding reception at our house. Before we were engaged, Mr. Scissors and I would play “dream wedding”, and we’d always come to the conclusion that having the reception at my parents’ house would be the epitome of awesome. (Mr. S may or may not have known the game was called “dream wedding”. That’s probably something I made up.)

So that’s what we’re doing. Childhood dream. Woo-hoo! Yes, having a wedding at a home is a ginormous undertaking. It’s a big pain in the ass. It’s pretty difficult. But how can you say no to this place? And big white tents? And a black-and-white checkered dance floor? You can’t.

I’ll give a little background profile on the house. It’s a Louisiana-style plantation home, designed and built by the architect that restored Oak Alley, as well as a great deal of the homes on St. Charles. The architect, Sam Wilson, was my parents’ architecture history professor at Tulane, and following their graduation, they all became friends. He was old, eccentric, sweet, and extremely talented. When they decided to build the house, they went to Sam for advice on who to hire as an architect.

“Me.”

“We would love to, sir, but there’s no way we can afford to be able to do that.”

“Why not? How about this—I’ll do it for free, but you have to promise to visit me in New Orleans at least twice a year.”

Obviously they took him up on his offer, and we visited him regularly until his death in the 1990s. He designed the house to look like Oak Alley originally, pink-painted brick and all. (The pink paint got scrapped at the last minute, for some reason. Who knows.) Everything in the house has a story, it seems. He drew every single window to scale. Our mahogany floors were reclaimed from an old cotton mill. The stairwell banister is from a bar in New Orleans. My father found an antique Waterford crystal chandelier in a hole-in-the-wall antique store in New Orleans that had been tossed out because no one could figure out how to put it together. (Though my father figured it out and restored it!) The stone columns in the front of the house were solid pieces of stone shipped from Georgia to Louisiana, turned on giant lathes, and then sent back to us in Georgia. My father handmade the molding for the entire house on tools that he and Sam designed together so that the products could be historically accurate. I really could go on and on about it, but I’ll start moving things along.

The plan for the reception and use of the house is as follows: Guests will enter on the front porch, where a bar will be set up, and they’ll spend the cocktail hour mulling around the front portion of the house. The food will be in the back courtyard, along with another bar, stand-up cocktail tables, and some sit-down tables. There will be a tent around the corner on the landing pad outside of the garage. The garage will be a staging area for the caterers, and the tent will house the majority of the sit-down tables, as well as the dance floor and DJ.

These photos are from a few months ago, and come with the following disclaimers:

1. These photos are not so great. I took them when I was still very, very green camera-wise. I had no idea what I was doing, and trying to learn how to shoot manual on everything. They bug the crap out of me, but it’s all I have at present.
2. My mother will kill me because of the state of the house in these photos. Long story short, my father was ill, and the landscaping sort of went to crazy. It will be fixed and amazing, I promise you. It’s a little jungle-ified at present. (Or it was in the fall when I took these shots.)

OK, on to the show!

The house is at the top of a hill, and those two brick-post-dudes are at the bottom. One has the address, the other has the house’s name, Lagniappe. Fun.

You turn around from that point on the driveway, and voila! House! OK, let’s walk up the hill. (For the reception, we will have golf carts shuttling people up and down the hill, because it’s a doozy.)

All of those chairs and random stuff on the front porch doesn’t usually live there. We were playing “let’s move everything into crazy places because the painters are coming.” Awesome game.

This is one of the shots that my mother will probably kill me the most over, but whatever. On the left, where the car is parked will be the tent and dancing area. There’s a large concrete area over which will rest the dance floor. The basketball goal will have to go bye-bye, sadly. (If anyone is wondering, those blue things are in the grass because the painters love to drive through our yard, especially after it rains.)

We plan to have the first bar set up where the green porch swing is.

Mr. Autumn is a cool dude. He’s the statue, and I want him to stay for our wedding, because he’s awesome and sort of creepy.

Hurricane shutters that were actually used during a hurricane. Hurricane Opal. Came in handy, they did.

View from the swing’s spot.

Now, we head around to the back courtyard, which is a hot mess. All of those plants are going bye-bye, save for the trees.

All of the food will be set up on long tables lining the brick wall.

That center brick thing is actually a fountain, or was a fountain. Right now it’s more of a koi swimming pool filled with plants. The fountain itself is being replaced, and the poor koi will have to part with most of their plants.

The gates are all iron with fleurs-de-lis.

Behind the courtyard is a super-major-crazy wooded area. It’s dark, twisty, brambly, and amazing. That urn is actually the ending point of a vista, which will re-vista itself once we start planting. We just have to figure out how to get the deer not to destroy everything that is planted.

The end!

More like the beginning, as we have a whole lot of work ahead of us to get this place into shape with respect to landscaping. Also, the logistics of having a wedding are… a big, complicated mess. If anyone ever tells you that it is cheaper or easier to “Just have the reception at home,” knock them upside the head for me, because it is certainly neither cheaper nor easier.

So concludes my brief (ha!) overview of the house, and the first of many reception venue posts! Look forward to more (and hopefully better and more informative) pictures, and more diagrams than you can shake a stick at.

Anyone else having a home wedding? Ceremony, reception, or both? Any tips or words of wisdom?