Strictly Un-Ballroom

Nontraditional wedding locations, such as urban lofts, are gaining popularity as brides shun that banquet-hall look.

By Maureen Sullivan for MSN City Guides

It used to be that a wedding horror story involved something gone awry—a photographer who didn’t show up, a cake that fell over, an entrée that recalled rubber chicken. Times have changed. Today there’s no greater nightmare for a bride than hearing her wedding was just like someone else’s.

Nowadays the bride wants a wedding that’s completely her own, not one that’s even a stitch like the many she’s been a bridesmaid in. She wants her guests to be dazzled, to comment on the fact that never before have they seen such a meaningful ceremony, such an original reception. But how does her wedding actually get to be one of a kind?

Enter the loft as a wedding site. These urban, often completely raw spaces practically mandate that each bride do her own thing within its walls because the walls are really all that’s there. In these blank-slate spaces, each event is bound to be different from the next—and there are almost no boundaries as to what’s possible in each.

To find out just how to go about transforming that cement block into the ultimate fairy tale setting (whatever the fairy tale may be), MSN City Guides talked to four wedding experts about what it takes to make one wedding stand out from all the rest.

The ballroom backlash
The current tendency of brides to run screaming from anything remotely run-of-the-mill has its roots in the hotel ballroom. Once the standard to which all other wedding receptions were held, the hotel ballroom developed a distinct disadvantage amid its very attractive features of convenience, cost-effectiveness and having everything available on site: It all started to look the same.

“The venue is the first thing you can do to change up from cookie-cutter,” says Josh Brooks of Fête Event Planning and Design in New York City. “You can walk into the same loft 10 times and have it be different every time.” Part of this stems from the fact that the layout of the loft can be easily changed, whereas the floor plan of a hotel ballroom typically cannot. With a loft or urban space, “you don’t inherit anything. You can put the band wherever you want,” Brooks says.

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• Related Slideshow: Nontraditional wedding venues

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Then there are the decorations—or lack thereof, as in a loft space. “It’s kind of like going into a home and gutting it. You get exactly what you want,” says Lora Horvath, owner of Save the Date Weddings and Events in San Francisco. “You don’t have a huge chandelier to work around.”

And there’s that carpet. “There must be one guy who picks all the carpeting [for hotels], and it’s always ugly,” says Brooks, who notes that most hotel ballrooms are created for corporate purposes, not weddings. As a result, you often don’t get much light or a good view.

But perhaps the biggest obstacles to originality are the wedding packages that hotels offer, which are harder to customize and change. Horvath describes a wedding she did at a loft in San Francisco called Dogpatch Studios where the couple really wanted to serve barbecue because that was their favorite food. “It was them to a T,” she says.

But that would never have happened at a hotel, Horvath adds: “You have more flexibility with vendors you bring in [in a loft], so you can really get the kind of food you want. If I went to a ballroom and said, ‘I want to do barbecue,’ they’d laugh at me.”