**see Wedding Wire for full details, character count limits imposed on this site:
https://www.weddingwire.com/reviews/architects-golf-club-phillipsburg/acb6a05268d1f11c.html
This... will be a long and thorough accounting of my November 2021 wedding experience.
I’ll start with the good things for my Architects Golf Club (later “AGC”) wedding celebration, as the list is shorter. The “day of” food and cake were very good, and the final set up of the reception room and ceremony space were nicely done.
Now, for the reasons this should be a 1 star rating if not for the above mentioned reasons. NOTHING went according to plan at this venue. There was constant re-planning as the wedding date got closer.
The wedding was originally set for 2020, but things changed for personal reasons (death of parent) and also the pandemic dampened things for everyone’s wedding planning, so our wedding at AGC took place in 2021. We didn’t get to have a food tasting, “due to the pandemic,” so we picked all of our food selections blind. Friends getting married elsewhere and earlier in 2021 had food tastings at their NJ venues, so it’s still unclear why that was not the case at AGC.
I started preparing the details in late 2019. From that time to the wedding this month, I had dealt with 4 different venue planners and essentially had to go over the details for my big day 4 times, and things were still missed, and altered by the venue last minute. On top of dealing with 4 different planners, we weren’t notified of the change in contact person, and discovered it when we went in for our final details meeting and no one was aware we were scheduled. *enter planner #3 that was plainly a “smoother,” who quickly passed some of the details from that meeting to final venue planner #4*
Result of these staffing changes and venue missteps? 1) First, we sat out in the cold on a patio without heaters for our rehearsal dinner on a 45 degree day. Why? They rented out the indoor seating space because “no one told the staff the space was already reserved,” though it was confirmed at our meeting with planner #3. So, my wedding party ate outdoors in the freezing cold the day before my big day, and we didn’t go elsewhere since no one is local and we didn’t want to add inconveniences to our family, as we’ve experienced with this wedding venue. 2) Next, our ceremony was moved from inside in front of the fireplace, where our florist created a floral plan during a walkthrough with venue planner #2, to outdoors in the heated tent THE DAY BEFORE our wedding, and a decision was wanted on the spot. 3) Also, my table linens matching my wedding palette, planned from 2019 with planner #1, “weren’t available” when being ordered the week before the wedding. 4) Most difficult to swallow, being the reason I picked this venue aside from the mountains surround, the cocktail hour was planned to be on the main level’s “Legacy Hall” with raised pub tables and an amazing wooden bar, and florals again planned around the aesthetic, BUT a couple weeks out I was emailed: “[the] Legacy Hall had a maintenance issue last weekend and is closed for repairs. Options for your cocktail hour will be the outside tent- which will be heated, or the main foyer.” When we arrived for rehearsal, we see the Legacy Hall space repurposed as a sitting area with a big screen TV for the golfers and nothing else about the space had changed or appeared closed for any repairs. 5) The day of –