Angela and Mark Karp are a fascinating, friendly, confident, and incredibly hard working couple. Angela (a proud British national) and Mark (from the good ole US of A), are respon...sible for the venue that gave us a better wedding than we could have ever dreamed of. Located at the northwest corner of 1st Street and Buchanan. The Croft Downtown doesn’t look like much from the outside. You drive past it and it looks like a warehouse amongst a bunch of warehouse and government buildings in south Downtown. But walk inside the main showroom and you quickly realize why the Croft is one of Downtown’s prized gems. The Croft is essentially four event spaces in one (two outdoor and two indoor). The theme of the venue is based on Alice in Wonderland (written by an author from Angela’s hometown of Croft, England).
Our wedding was on an unusually hot day in April, which (to me anyway) begged the question of whether they would be able to keep our guests cool. Fear not, the buildings are rigorously air conditioned and they even had swamp cooler ready to go for the patio. We had our wedding in the smaller indoor room (known as the Abbey) which they transformed into a gorgeous chapel for the ceremony. After that, a cocktail hour on the patio. And finally, a wonderful reception in their large indoor ballroom (known as the Cheshire room). The venue is accustomed to DJs providing music, but they can also accommodate bands (which we went with for our reception). They also have a gorgeous prep room near their main showroom where the bridal party can relax before the festivities begin. We also took the extra step of eating our dinner privately in that prep room before the reception got rolling (perhaps the smartest outside the box move we made!). Through it all, Angela and Mark were kind, organized, accommodating, and making every effort to make sure my wife and I didn’t have to worry about a thing on our big day. Angela and Mark also both made time to talk with us anytime we had concerns or ideas that we wanted to bounce off of them. One big point of emphasis I would make is that Angela and Mark work with excellent vendors. We went with their recommendations for catering (Alexi’s Grill), dessert (A Bakeshop), and bartending (A Couple of Bartenders). All of the vendors were familiar with the Croft and were absolutely wonderful. So if you’re not sure about vendors, you really can’t go wrong with the ones they recommend. Additionally, they have partnerships with downtown Phoenix hotels in case you’re looking to lock in some reduced group rates.
My best advice if you’re looking to book a Saturday wedding at the Croft would be to book at least 16 months in advance as we did. Yeah, the Croft really is that popular. In addition to weddings, the Croft does corporate events, fundraisers, art displays, and concerts throughout the week. We’ll almost certainly come back for non wedding events at this venue at some point. But purely as a downtown wedding venue, we couldn’t be happier. Everything we needed was right here in one place, valet parking for guests, great vendors to choose from, wonderful creative decor, a fun funky downtown industrial feel, and walking distance to the rest of downtown Phoenix. Angela and Mark are incredible and helped us pull off the wedding of our dreams. If you wanna get married downtown, good luck finding better.