Finding the Perfect Venue

The first thing on our planning list was to locate a venue.  Wallace and I wanted something unique and fun with a lot of character that could be a beautiful backdrop to our wedding all on its own.  I knew I didn't want our wedding to be in a traditional hotel ballroom or convention center; that just wouldn't have fit our style or the feel we were going for.  We started a list of must-haves for our potential wedding site:

1. Fit up to 250 guests
2. Double as our ceremony and reception site
3. Allow vendors of our choice
4. Located in downtown Milwaukee close to the lake, the third ward, and downtown hotels/bars
5. Available in September/early October

I was happily surprised to find that Milwaukee had quite a few unique wedding venues to choose from.  We were very lucky in that Paul's sister Heidi had had her wedding in Milwaukee the year before and had created a spreadsheet including the information for every possible venue there was (she was much more organized than I!). Heidi was nice enough to send me the spreadsheet and Wallace and I got to work figuring out which ones would work for us, which turned out to be a pretty challenging task.  Many of the venues we liked either could not accommodate the amount of guests we had or were already booked.   I felt discouraged and disappointed every time we visited a venue that I had high hopes for, only to find that they were booked solid until November.

Feeling like we would never find what we were looking for, I began thinking about the possibility of having a tented reception.  The more I thought about it, the more appealing it was.   It would essentially be a blank canvas in which we could design the space from the floor up, making it exactly what we wanted.  We could pick the perfect location and wouldn't have to worry about it already being booked.  I excitedly got to work researching tented weddings, only to find that for us, there would be more cons that pros.  As appealing as it was to be able to design our space from the ground up, the costs associated with this were huge.  We would have had to bring in everything from a dance floor, to tables and tableware, to a caterer's kitchen.  I never would have thought that having a tented wedding would be more expensive than having a non-tented one, but as it turned out they generally are! So we turned our efforts back to finding a pre-existing venue.


A few of my favorites that we went to visit were The Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, Cuvee, Lake Park Bistro, Discovery World, and the Iron Horse Hotel.  Unfortunately, all of these were either booked for September and October or they were too small for the amount of people we were expecting.  I  was getting more discouraged by the minute, and thought that we might not be able to have a fall wedding after all.  Then one day Lynda suggested we look at the Villa Filomena, a historic mansion located downtown.  It had been on Heidi's list, but we hadn't gone to look at it because there were no pictures online and we thought it would be too small (the ballroom only fit 200 for a sit down dinner).  We decided to go take a look anyway, and I am so happy we did!  The moment Wallace and I walked in we knew we had found our wedding site.  It turned out that another 50 people could fit in the parlor, making it the perfect size.  It was also the most "us" out of any of the venues we had seen, and we knew we could see ourselves getting married there.  The outdoor terrace provided the perfect backdrop for our ceremony, while the ballroom and parlor were beautiful, homey, and full of character.  We booked the only day that was still available, making our wedding date September 16th. We could not have been more excited!

Here we are a few weeks later in front of the Villa.