The venue itself is gorgeous. We have no complaints about the venue itself. The ceremony location on the terrace is beautiful, the Magnolia room is elegant and allows for just about any color scheme. There are a lot of beautiful photo spots in ...the area for some timeless photos. We enjoyed the food a lot, and everything is reasonably priced and you're allowed some flexibility with packages.
The main issue we had, and the reason we docked this place two stars, is because of Samantha. She was responsive at first and very accommodating. She answered our questions and is a very type A person who seemed on top of everything. However, as the months passed on she got harder and harder to get in touch with. When we needed to decide on packages and give lists and ask questions, she would often take WEEKS to respond back. We tried emails, follow up emails, phone calls to the club, to her office phone, even going there IN PERSON to see if we could catch her. This would be two months before the wedding. We tried to chalk it up to just being a busy wedding season, we understand it can be a lot to handle. When we got to be about two weeks out from the wedding we were at our wits end and ended up sending a rather terse email to her expressing our frustration; that got a response pretty quickly. She worked with us outside of normal hours to make up for her lack of response. We appreciated that.
We were able to get everything in to her, and work out who would focus on what during the day of with our day-of coordinator/florist. The responses would take a few days.
The day of the wedding came and everything seemed to be going smoothly, at least from my part. I was stuck in the bridal suite all day, we were able to order coffee, water, pastries, and lunch to be served in the bridal suite which was very nice.
It wasn't until after the wedding that I learned of some of the other issues that occurred. Prior to guest arrival while family was setting up the reception area, Samantha was not helping set up, she was giving a tour of the venue to presumably an interested couple. Because there wasn't much help available, my parents had to employ the help of my grandparents, guests, to help them and our day-of coordinator to help decorate.
Next, we were told by Samantha during the inquiry that the golfing hole right in front of the terrace would be closed at least during the ceremony. However, this hole was not closed off, and we do indeed have random golfers in our ceremony photos. Our photographer did an excellent job so it's not that big of a deal to us, but it's still annoying because they were there and a little distracting.
The instructions left by our baker were not read. Our cake baker made several small cakes. Samantha questioned why there were so many cakes and had them all thrown into the freezer. They were pound cakes and needed to be thawed before serving. We all sat waiting in the magnolia room for a considerable amount of time because the cakes were too hard to be cut properly. The cake was served cold and was still hard.
Samantha otherwise made sure everything else ran smoothly, but I do think a majority of that was due to our day-of coordinator being one of the best decisions we made regarding our wedding.
Overall, I think the venue and the pricing itself is worth it, I'm not sure if our experience with Samantha was a one-off thing. Our day was absolutely perfect and ran so smoothly, but make sure you're on top of communication and are diligent.