Barefoot on the beach or linens and roses
Choosing a venue that suits your style
By Laurie Higgins
Contributing Writer
Rain or shine
The old adage that if it rains on your wedding day, your marriage will last forever is of little comfort to a bride who plans an outdoor ceremony without a contingency plan in case of rain or inclement weather. Most venues with outdoor wedding sites also have a backup indoor space that can be made available at the last minute.
At the Captain Linnell House and Gardens in Orleans they move the ceremony into the ballroom which can hold 200 people. Luckily they’ve only had to do this four times in 20 years, says co-owner Shelly Hippler-Conway.
Heritage Museum and Gardens in Sandwich has had similar good luck. Director of Visitors Services Cristoff Shay says they have never had a wedding rained out, but he still recommends that couples put a tent on reserve just in case.
Donna Kalinick, wedding manager at Old Sea Pines Inn in Brewster, says weddings are moved from the garden area to a large covered porch if it rains. Last November they had a wedding planned for the evening of the hurricane and sure enough the electricity went out 10 minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin. They ended up doing the ceremony in the living room in front of the fireplace with beautiful oil lamps lighting the room. Old Sea Pines Inn has a generator so the kitchen staff could cook the food and the couple, who were local, ran home and got their own generator for the band.
“They said they will always remember it because they have this really great story,” Kalinick says. “They had dinner and danced by candlelight. It was truly a candlelit reception.”
Her best advice to brides is to plan ahead as best you can and then let go and enjoy the day because you’re not going to be able to relive it. You have to trust whoever you chose to do your wedding and know they will do their best to make your day as special as possible.
Don’t forget those permits
Many towns require permits before you can get married on the beach. Check with your wedding planner to see if your destination does. Most wedding planners will provide all the necessary forms, but you need to fill them out yourselves and pay a small fee depending on the town. |
The biggest slice of a wedding budget is the reception. Even more important, the choice of venue sets the theme of the entire wedding. That can make choosing the perfect venue an anxiety-ridden search. The good news is that the folks who run venues across the Cape really try to make the process as easy as possible by offering inclusive packages, well-tested referral lists and plenty of advice.
Shelly Hippler-Conway, co-owner along with her chef husband Bill Conway of the Captain Linnell House and Gardens in Orleans, says she and her husband have tried to eliminate all of the things they hate at weddings they’ve attended, such as long lines at the bar, cold food with bad sauces and servers who take your plate away too soon.
When choosing a venue, she advises couples to approach the task first with practicality, then emotion.
“I think they should consider budget first and compare it with their guest list,” Hippler-Conway says. “Some people get carried away with who they want to invite and then they can’t afford to do that. So look at all the denominators: the cost, the guest list, whether they love the site or not. You have to fall in love with the place.”
The Captain Linnell House is a restored French Neo-Classic Villa style mansion set on over two acres of gardens that have been restored to the year 1855 by Hippler-Conway, who was a professional restoration gardener before she and her husband bought the restaurant two decades ago. Picture cascades of wisteria, indigenous plants like hydrangeas and lavender and enough roses that guests are given rose petals to toss at the bride and groom at the end. The restaurant closes for weddings so the wedding party has full use of the mansion and grounds. Hippler-Conway estimates that about 30 percent of the wedding ceremonies are done onsite at the gazebo, with another 20 percent performed at nearby Skaket Beach.
To keep things simple they offer two packages, an hors d’oeuvres party or a sit down dinner.
“We’re a foodie bride’s restaurant. We’re really into balancing the hors d’oeuvres, dinner and dancing and the dinner is really really special,” Hippler-Conway says. With a pastry chef who makes wedding cakes onsite, “Our package is a really inclusive package. We try to think of everything that would stress out a bride and groom.”
The Old Sea Pines Inn in Brewster has a “Secret Garden” for ceremonies with a beautiful stone wall area with a greenery roof that used to be the foundation for one of the buildings when the inn was a school.
“In the last five years we’ve gone to doing 75 to 80 percent of the ceremonies on site now just because it’s more convenient for people. You don’t have to travel,” says Donna Kalinick, wedding manager at Old Sea Pines Inn.
Although it’s a romantic idea to get married at the beach, Kalinick says most people don’t consider the difficulties of finding a beach with plenty of parking or the fact that greenheads will be buzzing around their guests in July.
“Part of your job as a wedding coordinator is that people come to the table with a certain number of ideas and you want to try to get their dream wedding for them, but you also want to advise them as to what is reasonable and what’s going to work versus what’s not going to work,” she says.
Old Sea Pines Inn offers inclusive, flexible packages. Couples can choose from 10 menus and sit down service, family style, buffets, indoor station receptions, brunches and lobster bakes.
Kalinick says the median age of their brides is close to 30 and these more mature brides don’t necessarily want to follow tradition. They like to set the tone of their own wedding and things like receiving lines and even wedding cakes are starting to go out of fashion with couples choosing cupcakes or desserts instead.
As for cost, Kalinick says, “You’ve got to decide what is realistic for you to spend and then find the best-case scenario for that.”
Budget is the first thing couples should consider when choosing a venue, according to Bill Zammer, owner Cape Cod Restaurants, Inc. which does over 400 weddings a year at three different wedding venues: The Coonamessett Inn of Falmouth, The Flying Bridge Restaurant on Falmouth Harbor and The Clubhouse at Pinehills Golf Club.
“As long as they are realistic, we can work with their budget,” Zammer says. Each venue has a function coordinator who sits down with couples to help them plan the perfect wedding. Most couples have already downloaded the menus and price list from the restaurants’ Web site, Zammer says, so it is just a matter of deciding which menu fits their budget.
They do two basic styles of receptions: An elaborate cocktail party with hors d’oeuvres and stations or a traditional sit down dinner with a cocktail party to start.
Cape Cod Restaurants, Inc. also offers a package Zammer calls “The Perfect Wedding,” which includes a rehearsal dinner the night before, the wedding reception the day of, and brunch the day after.
“We do a lot of onsite weddings,” Zammer says. “Each place has a spot. We have garden setting at The Coonamessett Inn overlooking the pond. Up at The Flying Bridge we have a beautiful setting with a tent overlooking Falmouth Harbor. And at the Pinehills country club we have another garden which is really pretty with flowers and a gazebo.”
For a truly unique wedding, about 20 couples a year decide to get married at Heritage Museum and Gardens in Sandwich.
“We have a couple of different venues,” says Cristoff Shay, director of visitors’ services and wedding planner for the museum. “We have our Windmill Garden. It’s the most popular. The Sundial Garden, which is surrounded by thousands of daylilies. And then we have what’s called our Parade Field, which is our largest outdoor area. That’s surrounded by Shawme Pond and hydrangeas.”
After an outdoor garden ceremony, the reception can be held in the J.K. Lilly III Antique Auto Museum, which can accommodate a sit down dinner for 150 or a cocktail party for up to 300. Their exclusive caterer is The Casual Gourmet and Shay does everything he can to make it easy on the bride including calling the museum’s preferred vendors to set things up.
There are shuttles to move guest around the grounds, and a Rolls Royce golf cart for the bride and groom. A bridal suite stocked with champagne and flowers has a full bathroom and bridal mirrors for pre-ceremony preparations.
Grooms love the setting with antique cars, but Shay says brides also fall in love with the space. One bride draped fabric around the rotunda and placed Christmas lights inside so that when people dining below looked up, it looked like a starry night.
“A lot of the brides haven’t been to the museum before,” Shay says. “They do an Internet search and they see the beautiful grounds and then when they get here they’re just awestruck. A hundred acres of rhododendrons, daylilies, hydrangeas, it’s just an awe-inspiring site for people who love gardens or automobiles.”
For couples looking for a smaller or more casual wedding experience, Dave Schermacher, owner of Ptown Parties, offers wedding planning and catering services at a variety of locations. For weddings with about 50 guests, rental homes are a great option.
“We have about three that we like to use a lot in Provincetown because they have large decks that can be tented. But there’s also some bigger ones out in Truro,” he says.
He also plans tented receptions at Provincetown Monument and does outdoor weddings at several public beaches in Provincetown and Truro.
“We do a lot of the parties on the beach,” Schermacher says. “Last year our kitchen was located at the Top Mast Resort so that’s a nice spot because you get the sunsets over Provincetown. When you’re at Herring Cove, which is beautiful, you’re looking at the sunset over the water.”
Ptown Parties features creative menus with hot and cold passed and stationary hors d’oeuvres that can be prepared onsite or delivered ready made. They also offer a buffet menu and a very popular New England clambake on the beach. For clambakes they provide enough firewood to last the evening, lay out blankets, provide tiki torches and wind sails for ambiance and serve the food from a linen-draped buffet.
“A really fun place is the Blue Sea Motor Inn,” Schermacher says. “What’s really neat there is they are in the part of Truro that’s on the bend to Provincetown so their beach is huge. We’ve been able to do a clambake wedding reception for over a hundred people right on the beach tented so all the guests were in bare feet the whole time.”
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