Judith Carr and Paul Rodriguez were married in a private home in Southampton, N.Y., that they rented for a week so their families could get acquainted.
MARINA GIOVANNELLI, in her quest for a distinctive wedding location, said she wanted to break from the “formulaic feel” of affairs in hotels and museums in the city of her childhood, San Diego.
“I was looking for an alternative to the prefabricated wedding experience that was unavoidable with a lot of the venues,” said Ms. Giovannelli, 32, who now lives in Boston and is a communications strategy consultant. “You have to use their caterer, stick to their timeline. I wanted it to be different.”
So she and her fiancé, Andrew Scherr, 30, a multimedia producer, opted for what may seem old-fashioned: a backyard wedding. But not an ordinary backyard at an ordinary house.
After browsing through dozens of homes and estates in Southern California at estateweddingsandevents.com, Ms. Giovannelli visited and booked her dream location: the Emma Estate, a four-bedroom Tuscan-style ranch on three lushly landscaped acres in Rancho Santa Fe.
“I could create what I wanted, instead of adapting what I wanted to a venue,” she said. “It felt elegant and comfortable and intimate. It’s like hosting people in your home.”
The 115 guests entered the house at the Sept. 29 wedding through the double-height foyer, peeking at the living room, dining room and den on their way out French doors to the ceremony by the rose garden. After cocktails on the patio by the pool, spa and outdoor fireplace, guests crossed a lawn lighted by lanterns to a tent for dinner and dancing.
Jane Siann, the homeowner, said she listed her house on the Web site four years ago at a caterer’s suggestion when friends borrowed the property for their wedding. The fee starts at $3,500.
“All I have to do is make sure my garden is presentable and my house is pretty picked up,” Ms. Siann said, adding that the weddings have incurred “very little breakage.” She said she rolls up a few rugs, locks up valuables, boards her parrot, puts her five cats in the garage and checks into a hotel with her two dogs, leaving the party management to Jamie Ehrsam, who owns estateweddingsandevents.com. With a dozen weddings scheduled this year, the Emma Estate is fully booked.
Ms. Ehrsam said her company holds a refundable security deposit (50 percent of the rental fee) for all minor damage and incidentals. Additionally, homeowners and vendors must obtain special event and general liability insurance. Ms. Giovannelli said her $2,500 security deposit for the Emma Estate was fully refunded after her wedding.
Over the last decade the “fantasy of having a wedding at a mansion on the water in the Hamptons” became a “first choice” among brides, said Jill Gordon, a wedding planner in East Hampton, N.Y. But renting someone else’s yard for a day is not cheap.
“People come into this thinking they will get some sort of Gatsby residence on the ocean,” she said. “Sometimes that’s unrealistic thinking,” she added, unless they have $75,000 to $100,000 to invest in the event, not counting the tent, table and chair rentals, caterer, band or flowers.
Nancy Grigor, a location scout for events and the movies “The Nanny Diaries” and “Something Borrowed,” said she gets 15 to 20 calls a week from brides looking for wedding sites in the Hamptons. She said it was “just as easy” to find the perfect private residence for a wedding as it was to arrange a movie or a magazine shoot for Calvin Klein.
“The girls want to get married in the Hamptons and on the beach,” she said. “There are a lot of great properties out here to do weddings.”
Erin Schumacher rented Still Bend, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home in Two Rivers, Wis., for her wedding. She and her husband met as architecture students.
Among her clients were Paul Rodriguez, 30, and Judith Carr, 35, of Manhattan, who after a tour last year, made a list of their top 10 wedding properties. For the week before their June 9 wedding, they paid $25,000 for a nine-bedroom Victorian in Southampton, N.Y., so that their siblings could stay there.
“We wanted to feel like we were bringing Paul’s family from Texas and my family from England into our own home,” Ms. Carr said. The family members could also get to know one another as they saved on hotel expenses.
The ceremony was held in a walled “secret garden,” followed by poolside cocktails and a family-style buffet reception and pig roast for 100 guests under a tent on the front lawn.
“It was very relaxed and felt more like a garden party than a stuffy wedding,” Ms. Carr said, down to the lime tart with berries instead of a wedding cake. Afterward, the couple and their guests spent time by the pool.
“It was everything that we both dreamed of, very intimate,” she said, rather than the “conveyor belt” feel of a vineyard and other “cookie cutter” venues.
Sometimes, a house has special significance. Troy Gallas, 29, and Erin Schumacher Gallas, 30, who met as architecture students at the University of Minnesota, paid $2,165 to rent Still Bend, a privately owned residence designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Two Rivers, Wis., for their September 2011 wedding weekend.
“The unique atmosphere of his structure lent itself perfectly to what we wanted for our wedding,” Mr. Gallas said. After the ceremony and dinner outside, their 50 guests danced in the living room. “For an event that special we wanted to make sure the venue was just as special.”
Closer to New York City, another architecturally significant house, the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., will be available for weddings beginning in the spring, according to Christa Carr, the director of communications. Guests will be limited to 35, and packages running from $10,000 to $50,000 will include a tour of the house site with lunch or brunch on the lawn or in the painting gallery. The costs of food, beverages, tent, ceremony and rentals are not included in the price, and red wine is not allowed.
In Burleson, Tex., it’s Patricia Sullivan’s Lone Star Mansion, an antebellum-style home on 18 acres in a residential neighborhood. She converted the garage into a 2,500-square foot “crystal cathedral,” as she calls it, with a caterer’s kitchen attached.
But what persuaded Alex Ailara, 22, and her groom, Jamie Whitman, 23, to wed there on Oct. 13 was a man cave in the basement that the groom and his entourage could use while getting ready. It had a 73-inch flat-screen television, a pool table, poker room and dry sauna.
“It felt like the day was special not only for the bride but for the groom as well,” the bride said.
In Malibu, Calif., Richard and Charmaine Mark rent out their oceanfront property, Cypress Sea Cove, for eight weddings a year. Though guests are not allowed inside their ship-shaped, storybook-style white Victorian, the bride and groom have the use of the Marks’ two acres of palm- and cypress-studded gardens and beachfront, complete with a tiki bar (built for the filming of an episode of the television show “House”). Nearby, sea lions sun on rocks and dolphins frolic in the Pacific waves.
Mr. Mark takes part in the couple’s magical day, as he sometimes opens a window to enjoy the music and get a “bird’s-eye view of two families coming together.”
“It’s like a canvas and then they paint it,” he added. “Every one of these events is an exciting thing to be part of. It is a blessing.”
Text extracted from : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/fashion/weddings/renting-someone-elses-home-for-a-dream-wedding.html
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