Casa De Morrill

Sean and I started to search for our wedding/reception site this weekend. We started in Atlanta. My parents came over and we drove around Atlanta all Saturday looking at a few different sites. We only made it through 3 sites, but that was more than enough to make our brains go to mush with all of the information. Here’s a quick breakdown of the sites we went to look at. Pictures will be forthcoming once I can cut them down to viewable sizes.

Mansell House - We looked at this one first thing in the morning. They had a wedding that day, so we could only stay for a little while. We would basically rent the place and everything else (flowers, catering, cake, etc) would be up to us to take care of. They provide some chairs and tables for the ceremony and reception, but that’s it. The gardens were quite beautiful. Very much English style gardens. The inside of the house was nice, too, but not anything to write home about. They had basically taken an older home from the area, moved it to this site and made it look nice on the inside, even though that wasn’t the way the family had originally decorated the house by any means.

Flint Hill and the Atrium - This was our next stop. We hadn’t planned on looking at the house, but Lisa mentioned it as a possibility, so we went over there and the event manager was glad to give us a tour of the place. Flint Hill is an older style home. They had done an extremely nice job of landscaping as well as tastefully decorating the inside. The Atrium is another site run by the same people, but just across the street from Flint Hill. It was a Regions Bank before they had relandscaped the outside and completely redone the inside. Again, the inside was tastefully decorated, but also quite elegant. At this location, they would do everything for us from floral decorations to catering to cake. A wedding coordinator would be in charge on the day of the wedding so that everyone in the wedding party could be guests instead of having to worry about details. The bride and groom would even be allowed to disappear right after the ceremony so they could eat their first meal by themselves. (Yes, that was a very cool feature for me, since the horror stories I hear about the bride and groom never getting a chance to eat.) Unfortunately, these locations came with a hefty price tag as well, so it looks like these will be out of the running because of that (oh, to win the lottery right now!).

Nacoochee Valley Guest House - This was our last place to look at. That was good because it’s about an hour or so north of Atlanta, just a few miles down the road from Helen, GA. This location was quite happily settled at one end of the Nacoochee Valley, so as you look out from their large, nicely landscaped backyard, you could look down on a lovely view of the rest of the valley. The lady who runs this guest house was quite nice. Her daughter graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in New York. She cooks all of the meals for the house as well as doing all of the catering for the events held there. The inside of the house was a little small, but they had a partially covered back porch that then led into the backyard. Here, they would take care of all of our catering needs as well as making the wedding cake and groom’s cake if we wanted them to. Everything else would be left up to us. They would provide most of the chairs for the ceremony as well as tables and chairs for the reception.

Sean and I ranked them in the order of Nacoochee Valley, Flint Hill and the Atrium (we preferred the Atrium) and then Mansell House. We’ll see what else we can turn up in Atlanta, as well as potential sites in Huntsville and see what our budgets all for.