Decision Making For Dummies: The Venues That Almost Were

My criteria for finding our reception venue were fairly simple. (Or at least, they were simple to me.) The venue needed to be:

Affordable. We’re on a budget here, people!
Small and intimate. No grand echoing ball-rooms for us. We wanted something fairly low-key so that we would have to be restricted on numbers for our wedding.
Pretty on the outside. This is where I get a little bit vain: I wanted a venue that would look beautiful in our wedding album for years to come.
Pretty on the inside. I didn’t want to spend too much extra money decorating the room, so I wanted it looking gorgeous without any additions of my own.
Flexible on inclusions. The last thing I wanted to do was to get tied down on what was included & what wasn’t—I wanted everything laid out in front of me, and preferably with a little bit of choice here and there.
HELPFUL. I needed to know that the venue we chose would be positive to deal with, especially since I wasn’t going to be local to sort out any issues or to help answer my random questions as I thought of them from a thousand miles away.

Without going into too much detail, here are just a handful of the many venues I visited with Momma Jaguar and my awesome MOH while I was home in Sydney.

Starting at the top left, going clockwise we have: 1. Golf Club, 2. Sydney Harbour-side function room, 3. Historic homestead, and 4. Funky wharf-side three-tiered loft.

And some more, we have: 1. Management college in Manly, 2. Another Golf Club, 3. Function room in a national park property, and 4. Yet ANOTHER Golf Club.

Decision Making For Dummies: The Venues That Almost Were : wedding sydney venues 21 2

Some of these venues turned out to be amazing in person, and some were more than a little disappointing. I was lusting over the view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but the room itself was really average and the service was terrible—they disregarded the appointment I’d made, told me I was mistaken (uh, no, have you SEEN my itinerary?) and then almost refused to show us around. I wasn’t impressed. The golf clubs I liked the sound of, because they were quite low-key and beautifully manicured, but none of the ones we visited would be for our venue only, and wasn’t keen on sharing the bar area with a bunch of club members.

It came down to the loft space you can see in the top image, which I’d not-so-secretly like to live in one day, or our super traditional venue, which isn’t pictured in any of these images. I called Mr. Jaguar who was back home in London, and together we decided that we just weren’t modern enough to work with the awesomeness that was the loft, so that was that: we had our venue. I can’t wait to show it to you!

Did you have a hard time narrowing down your choices for the wedding reception?