This venue is gorgeous and unique. It feels like a dream home, not a wedding hall. Regardless of season, you have a beautiful backdrop due to the grounds and architecture.I want to... break this up into 2 very different sections: The lead-up to the wedding and the wedding itself
Wedding day: Phenomenal.
-The food was delicious, everything ranged from good to great, I had multiple guests tell me this was some of / the very best wedding food they've ever had.
-The staff were attentive and consistently present. They set up all of our signs and pictures and candles in a beautiful and thoughtful manner. The bartender was absurdly friendly and great with the guests. They constantly tended the fireplace in a way that didn't disrupt our guests.
-The dropoff process and communication in the week leading up was clear, expectations were clearly made as to what we needed.
-When little things went wrong day-of, the wedding coordinator did a great job of rolling with it
-As a result of the amazing work of Crissi, the coordinator, and the staff, we honestly have only positive impressions of our wedding at Aldie mansion
Lead up to the wedding: Rough. Very rough.
-I think that a large part of our poor experience stemmed from our initial "wedding planner." I say that in quotations because Aldie "comes with a wedding planner", but it's a bit of a misnomer because really they're more a representative of JAM catering, who is the only caterer for Aldie, and day-of coordinator at the venue. This is the person through which you order your food, plan the day, figure out staffing, etc - so everything Aldie Mansion and catering related. So yes, they do a good bit more than a typical catering representative, but they are NOT the classic wedding planner you expect
- I am unsure if they were short staffed, but the primary manager said she would be our planner after we reached out because we had not been informed of who our coordinator would be after the time frame provided to us by the company. This lead to multiple problems: Rough / delayed communication, incomplete information on the available food, delayed meeting start time, feeling pressured into certain choices. Overall the whole experience just felt uncomfortable because we were promised this great personalized wedding experience but whenever we had questions or requests we were made to feel like burdens. I wrote more details, but TheKnot has character limits in their reviews, so the more detailed version is at wedding wire if you're interested.
This all led to us requesting a different planner, things went much smoother at that point onward and we feel the replacement did a great job. Crissi was beyond amazing. She was consistently responsive, had wonderful ideas and recommendations, and was either able to explain why some things would not be feasible or let us know that things like that are routinely done and therefore were a non-issue, despite what our previous coordinator had said. Day of, we knew there was nothing we had to worry about with Crissi, and this ended up 100% being the case. If you get the chance, I highly recommend requesting her.
So in full - did we have an amazing wedding experience and were they totally on their game in the week beforehand? Absolutely. Was the road there long and tortuous and unnecessarily stressful? Absolutely until Crissi took over