Hip Ritz Carlton Dana Point Wedding

Posted on: Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

Had a fun journey with this lovely couple of mine. When they first came to me my bride had an inspiration picture, it was a church ceremony with lots of candles down the aisle. The bride grew up in San Diego and preferred to do everything in that vicinity, but based on my couple of meetings I had had with them to this point, I was visualising what I thought would be their perfect celebration.
So we started in San Diego, the ceremony feeling had expanded to a more cathedral look, and in S CA we are limited with those kind of churches/chapels, and San Diego limits it even more, but we did find two chapels that would work, great, now time to find the reception location. We visited around 8 different locations, some the more traditional ballroom look, but a couple with a twist, one of which I thought would be perfect. The Groom loved the one I thought would be perfect, unfortunately what I did not know, was I did have them pegged, and that was where they had recently held her 30th birthday celebration, because it was exactly their kind of vibe/uniqueness & party atmosphere type location, but of course now I knew that, I had to agree with the bride, been there done that, so we needed to come up with another great idea. At the end of that day I had them follow me up to the Ritz-Carlton Laguna and I showed them my thoughts for doing the reception there. Each year I have a couple who is willing to let the hotel dictate the date based on how we want to use the space, and be willing to work with a higher F&B minimum even with a smaller group in order to use the property as we would like, and I felt they could be my 2012 couple. They liked the idea, but we were loving the cathedral in San Diego, that was too far to have guests drive, so what to do. They looked at a couple of other reception locations but there was nothing in SD that fit their vision, so we focused on the Ritz-Carlton option, but now to find a church where we could get that feel/vision the bride had, it took a while, but finally Mariners Chapel in Newport Coast was it. So we did a 7pm ceremony so we were sure of the darkness and the candlelight ceremony feel, then at the Ritz, the guests had cocktails on the balcony of the Plaza room, we then invited them to the courtyard where dinner and the wedding cake were served, then the guests followed the B&G to the party room (where we had go go dancers!!) and party they did until around 2am. It turned out fabulously. And proud to say, I was right on with the reception venue/my initial vision. But there are times we must go through the process/journey, so the final decision is known to be the right decision and you never second guess yourself or wonder what else may be out there.
We had a great team on this one also, thanks to Square Root for the candle/floral vision becoming a reality, Fusion for the cool furniture look we created, my lovely Peter of Vive Entertainment for fitting in as always as a fabulous mcee and dj, and of course the wonderful team at the Ritz-Carlton all the way from Fernanda in sales who helped me make the space work, to the service and banquet team on the day.

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Till next time
Lisa

www.lisasimpsonweddings.com
www.pinterest.com/lisasimpsonwdgs
714 305 7112

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