“We got married at The Lake House on Saturday, June 10, 2023 and were VERY happy with our choice of venue! Our guests did not stop talking about how pretty the lake and foliage surrounding it were, plus the fountain in the lake (which was newly added just before our wedding). We held our ceremony outdoors in front of the willow tree and our cocktail hour split between the parlor room and the lakefront, and all our outdoor photos were stunning. One of the main reasons we picked The Lake House was because we didn’t have to decide until day-of where on the property we wanted our ceremony to be, so we were able to make a last minute call based on the weather. We lucked out on getting to go with the outdoor option, but unfortunately the way our ceremony was set up, all the photos of us walking down the aisle have cars in the parking lot in the background (there were no cars in the parking lot when we did our tour, so we didn’t even think about this in advance). This is just a note for your photographer, or possibly a reason to angle the chairs differently than we did. A solvable issue!
The Lake House’s team was very easy to work with leading up to our event and really helped us get excited about the day. They were prompt in responding to our questions, flexible with requests (such as signature drinks, adjusting the start time of our ceremony after booking, and allowing us to bring in almost any decor we wanted), and clearly experienced in wedding planning/execution. Two additional things that made The Lake House stand out to us were the fact that they had 2 bridal suites, which is hard to find but important for us as an LGTBQ couple with 2 brides, and a really high-quality speaker system that our DJ was able to plug into (for a fee).
One challenge we had was that despite providing an extremely detailed map of where we wanted our decor set up and going over it during an in-person meeting with the coordinators just 2 days before our wedding when we dropped it all off, the decor was not set up as we asked it to be when we arrived day-of. We were only allowed to arrive 1.5 hours in advance of our ceremony, so this was stressful, since we and our immediate family members had to run around adjusting things before guests arrived. At the end of the night, the staff did not provide much help packing things up either. We would recommend hiring a day-of coordinator rather than just relying on their staff, specifically for setup and breakdown.
The only other complaint we had was that dinner service was incredibly slow. Everyone at a given table was served at the same time, but half of the room was finished with their meals before the other half was served. This caused our post-dinner activities to be extremely delayed, and we ended up paying our photographer, videographer, and DJ extra cash on the spot to stay longer than they had signed up for. The food was good, though, and dessert was even better! We added the adult ice cream sundae bar as a second dessert option, and it was a big hit.
One last thing of note is that the venue is entirely handicap accessible and has plenty of parking, two things that were important to us and not true of all the other venues we considered. Overall, we would highly recommend The Lake House as a wedding venue with some proactive planning around the concerns we listed above. We had an incredible day!”
