on the hunt for a reception venue/day 2.1

with the huron substation of awesome out of the picture, casey and i turned to plan b. so it happened, my mom and uncle decided to visit me for my birthday for the first time in nine(!) years. since they were staying for a few days, we decided to devote one day to traipsing around la and pasadena in search of reception locales. i planned the whole day, setting up four appointments with four possibilities to host our reception.

location #1 at 11:00am:

the walt disney concert hall

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how can you not like it? frank gehry designed it! on a napkin! it's so shiny and wavy and can you imagine having a reception there?!? it has the total wow-factor, though not necessarily the rustic charm, but we were ok with that.

we met up with our sales associate who took us to two locations inside that we could potentially use as reception areas. first up was bp hall:

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when i saw this room, all i could think of was how effing dramatic it was. beautiful, right? all wood curves and an enormous ceiling that had giant skylights peeking through wood panels. plus, those fancy steps in the first picture? well, that is the entryway to get to bp hall. cool!

the second place we saw was the founder's room:

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this one had a really neat ceiling/art piece with wavy panels and all those naked light bulbs that you can see in the photo. not as dramatic as the bp hall, but did have it's own bar, a patio/garden area for a cocktail hour and it's own private elevator from the parking garage. it reminded me very much of a vintage-y gentelman's bar, both in terms of colour palatte and the overall design of the room.

the third room we saw was not in the WDCH, but in the neighbouring building- the music center. it's simply called the fifth floor, and it's a much more typical banquet hall with a killer view (floor-to-ceiling windows!) of the music pavilion and some of downtown los angeles. the cheapest of all three rooms, it was the most generic. since this dangerously crosses into my no-hotels rule, we had to discard it. plus, the 'rents weren't too thrilled with it, which I understood.

while we loved the look and the overall drama of the WDCH, the overall cost was proving too high, so we ended up not going with this great location.

next up: location two! or would that be location three?