Update: this review was edited after the Woodward reached out regarding my initial review. After a phone call with the event planner, several points have been edited below to refle...ct the conversation.
We booked the Woodward after deciding to postpone our wedding in 2020 due to COVID. When we signed, Dan and Laura were our main points of contact and had been wonderfully communicative and addressed some concerns we had regarding our larger-bodied guests and guests with mobility concerns. At some point during the ~18 months between signing and our wedding day, there was a change within the owner partnership. We were never notified of the change or provided with new point of contact information. After reaching out several times over the summer (2021) to the email I had been directed to use by Laura and Dan (which it turns out was a personal email rather than a company email), I reached out to the general inquiries email and learned of the change. Duru (the new event planner) took up communication with us from there. The communication with Duru occurred mostly over email. In my most recent phone call, some of the behind the scenes information was shared with me, and that helped to clarify some of our email communication. For example, a few weeks before our wedding, we learned that the chairs provided by the Woodward had a weight limit of 250lbs, so we needed to rent chairs as a result. At the time, it felt like we ran into pushback from Duru (via email) when we told her that we would need to rent all new chairs in order to make sure that guests would not be embarrassed by potentially breaking a chair. After our recent phone call, it was made clear that this was the first room flip the new staff was doing with all rented chairs, and the questions and suggestions that felt like pushback were instead trying to figure out logistics. A similar situation arose regarding beer choices in our bar package. Overall, the Woodward was a beautiful venue for our wedding and completely fit the vibe we were looking for; however, the transition in ownership did lead to several unnecessary headaches and made our wedding planning experience more challenging than it needed to be. In working with the Woodward, I would recommend using more phone communication than I did. The clarification I received over the phone (post-wedding) was extremely helpful and would have shifted the way I experienced those instances of misunderstanding.