The Place to Be

When I was in seventh grade, a girlfriend and I decided we would be cool by answering the phone, no matter who called, by saying, "Hello, this is [name] at The Place To Be!" I don't know what conversation led to this clever plan, but suffice it to say it didn't last very long.

Why that random memory? Well, because I'll be sharing our venue with you in this post, of course! And for that one night in July, to us anyway, it will absolutely be The Place to Be.

If it's a popular wedding venue in Dallas, not only do we know about it, but we've probably called, emailed, or visited. Most of this is complicated by the fact that we started out planning two different types of weddings (oops).

After our outdoor wedding idea melted away, it was back to the drawing board with a few requirements:
- A place with windows (I still wanted to see the sunset at our wedding)
- A beautiful ceremony site and reception site, since we wanted both in the same place, and both indoors
- Easy to get to or in a place people could reference easily (ie., "Downtown").
- and of course, a place that met our budget.

The venue-hunting process was more difficult than we would have liked. Some places were downright rude, others, openly discriminatory. Some were extremely gracious, but just not right for us. Some of them never returned calls or emails (and this was before we'd offered them any money!). One extremely popular place lost our vote when we pulled up and Mr. Oyster said, "It looks like a funeral home!"

At another one, we went to an "open house/tasting" and came home with ill stomachs (ew!). Another place had no wheelchair/disabled access ("Well, can't she use the service elevator..?"). One place was painted a weird shade of green that gave me nightmares, although it did have beautiful natural light. Here is a contemplative Mr. Oyster at this venue. I wonder what he was thinking??

"My stomach hurts."

But after all the drama, the last place on our list turned out to be the best one: the Tower Club.

As soon as we walked in, we loved it. The Tower Club seemed to be a good mix of classic + modern decor, and has some interesting places to take pictures. This is helpful especially since, considering it's July, we will not want to go outside for portraits.

I don't know if there are many all-in-one-spot Dallas brides; from the way vendors talk, we're the only people they know not getting married in a church (gasp!). I don't have any pictures of a ceremony taking place at our venue, but it will be in the room pictured below. I love chandeliers and I'm glad we'll have them at our wedding!

Luckily, some great local photographers have been to our venue. Totally embodying the urban chic aesthetic of the Tower Club is the wedding if Gina & Derek, photographed by F8 Studios. I love this view of the city. 

From this image, I got the idea of using pinspots to highlight arrangements and give the room some visual interest -- on the opposite side of this gorgeous room is a boring beige wall. :(

I initially hated these circular ceiling fixtures, but decided they can actually look kind of cool:

 

I love this wedding from Table4 photography. This image helped put my mind at ease halfway through planning, when I began to feel sad about not finding a place with prettier walls or higher ceilings:

The dance floor doesn't look too bad, either:

I'm still debating whether to do a traditional send-off exit, which seems a little contrived, or a more organic exit where people sort of fade away and we can say goodbye at leisure. Guess which one the venues seem to prefer? Anyway, it makes for a great shot or two (this one from Stacy Reeves):

I worried about confusing myself, or causing additional stress, by seeing so many pictures of weddings at our venue, but I found that it just made me feel better. I wasn't really able to make our wedding "real" until I saw these photos.  It was great to see so many different weddings in the same place, which reassured me that we can indeed "make it our own" despite there having been so many weddings there.

I highly recommend to brides (and grooms) is to find pictures of weddings that have already happened at the venue you're considering. For a Google search, just put in "[venue name]" [city] wedding photography (or "photographer").

No matter how cool it looks in person, you need to see it when it's full of people, lights, flowers, etc. and get a feel for it. Plus, it's fun to put yourself in the place of the brides in the images -- pretty soon, that could be you!