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| - Had my wedding here in 2010. We got engaged in December and thought we'd do a May wedding and looked at a few places, but as soon as we saw Ashley Manor I wanted to hold it there. It was beautiful. When I expressed my interest to the coordinator at Ashley Manor she told me that I could get a major discount if I opted to do our wedding earlier than the wedding 'season' at the end of the Spring, like we'd originally planned. The discount was considerable if we could do the wedding on certain weekday dates in February and we were game, so our late May wedding suddenly became our mid-February wedding. As you can imagine we were rushing to get things done! Thank God for the Ashley Manor coordinators, they made it 100x easier than I could have ever imagined!
We opted for an all-inclusive package which (in 2010) was almost $10,000, again we got a nice discount because we chose a less popular time. The package included facility rental, food and drink for 50 people (LUX Catering: three appetizers, two entrees, one salad, one vegetable, one starch), basic bar service and a bartender, a DJ and Master of Ceremonies for 5 hours, a cake for 50 (Nancy Rae Cakes), ALL of the flowers for the whole event, a security guard, and a choice of linen colors for the tables and a coordinator to make sure the whole thing went smoothly.
The good things
-The place is very, very pretty, there are a couple of places here and there that could use some minor repairs and updating, but really, this place is pretty.
-Our flowers were amazing! We ordered blue roses and white Easter lilies. The effect was gorgeous, and they didn't spray paint the roses, but had them water dyed the exact same color of bright blue that I wanted. I'm a florist's daughter, and I was impressed.
-The cake was beautiful and DELICIOUS. We ordered a banana cake with strawberry filling and white buttercream icing, piped in a lacy-white spiderweb overlay. Not only did Nancy Rae not bat an eye when we told her we wanted a 'Corpse Bride' themed cake, she went above and beyond in delivering one! We had collectors edition Corpse Bride figurines for our cake toppers and the effect was beautiful, creepy and playful.
-They had no issues with us doing a candy buffet and happily provided a candy table in the castle turret opposite the cake turret. We did an assortment of purple, black, blue and green candies and custom message fortune cookies in multi-tiered apothecary jars with blue butterflies and purple and blue dragonflies clinging to the sides, all with monogrammed, white Chinese take out boxes. It was spectacular.
-Additionally, Ashley Manor's DJ was great. Our ceremony ending song was New Order's-Ceremony and he timed the music to our exit perfectly, and he was actually excited when we told him that our 'Mr. & Mrs. Introduction' song should be the energetic trumpet opening to Oingo Boingo's-Dead Man's Party. Our first dance was to Blue October's-Calling You and he nailed it. He only failed us once by using some techno re-mix of Echo & The Bunnymen's-Lips Like Sugar for the cake cutting ceremony, not the original recording.
-The LUX Catering food was quite good and we enjoyed everything, and our bartender was friendly and accommodating. (We brought in our own cases of wine).
The not so great things
-The coordinators were all very friendly, but they weren't consistent. We worked with at least 3 different coordinators over the span of about 10 weeks and it was a bit confusing not knowing who was in charge of our file that particular day and having to reexplain the last discussion with the other coordinator to them each time we had a conversation. The one MAJOR glitch was that we believed that one of the coordinators had offered us two additional appetizers, but the next coordinator would not honor it and claimed it wasn't documented, so we had to pay out of pocket in the last couple of weeks to cover the two extra appetizers.
-We hardly got any prep time before the wedding for photos because we were coming in on the heels of another wedding, because of that we only got a few photographs of the wedding party. That made me very sad.
-Finally, at the end of the event almost NOBODY was still there from Ashley Manor staff for me to ask if there was anyone to help us clean up and pack our stuff. I didn't know if we were supposed to leave our stuff and get it the next day, or what. We weren't really told what to expect, and so there I was at midnight, in my gown, trying to pack up my stuff and get ready to leave. Finally someone told us we could get it in the morning if we got there by 10 AM. When we got there the next day, our stuff was packed up for us and ready to go, but sadly one of my apothecary jars from my candy buffet had been broken and the cake topper that we were supposed to freeze for our one year anniversary had been crammed into a too-small cake box and smooshed. :(
Pics uploaded.
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