Our Venue!

….and we decided to go with:

The Harrison Opera House!

While initially we had considered a tent reception, we had so many reservations over the tent idea, and the opera house is a fantastic venue. The interior is gorgeous, and the reception will be held on the second floor in the Grand Lobby. I love the winding staircases up to the lobby and the balcony that overlooks the main entrance below. The gorgeous tall windows are such a good backdrop for the reception, and we really don’t have to go overboard with our decorations, since the venue is so pretty on it’s own. It has a touch of modern elegance mixed with a bit of traditional design. Now that we have a venue…and yes, we had to move up our date by a week, but it’s not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things(!)…there’s a lot less stress! I’m so excited to be able to focus on how we want to decorate for the reception, now that we HAVE our reception venue 🙂

Inside of the Grand Lobby

Since my fiance works at the opera house, we have access to furnishings that are available there for free. It looks like we’ll have plenty of tables…but the chairs that they have are a bit ratty, to be honest, so we’ll need to rent them. I would love love love to have Chiavari chairs, but I just can’t justify the cost per chair since we are trying to plan our wedding on a small budget. If anyone knows where to find cheap Chiavari chairs…pass that info along please! 🙂 

Because of the elegance of our venue, our decorations don’t have to be too elaborate. I do want floral arrangements on each table, preferably with oversized vases, like these:

I also really wanted cocktail tables, because I love the idea. I’ve been to a few weddings where they had cocktail tables surrounding the dance floor, and I knew that I wanted to incorporate them as well. Luckily, the opera house has enough of them, so we won’t even need to rent any!