The Venue! Part 4

Next up was the Mellwood Arts and Entertainment Center, a building located just outside of downtown that is a former meat packing company-turned-artist space. The complex is huge, and it has tons of artists' studios and shops, including a rather large art supply store, and a restaurant just opened there as well. We had actually been to a craft fair there a couple years ago, so I was sort of familiar with the building, but it turns out that there is much more to the complex than I originally thought.


A view of the outside of the building. It doesn't look like much from the outside, but it's awesome inside. The larger event room is above the parking garages on the bottom floor, and those white balcony doors open up from the event space onto that gorgeous lawn outside. The second room is behind the first one (to the left side of the picture), and also opens onto the lawn.

Mellwood has two rooms, both with a very exposed-pipes, loft-style feel (a recurring theme for us, no?). The larger room seats way over 200 people, and costs twice our maximum budget, so it was out. The smaller room was good for our number of guests and fit a little better into our budget, but it was just a reception space. To use the lawn for the ceremony would have been more money, and that would have put us slightly over budget, although I would have been OK with that if we had totally loved the place.

A picture of the larger room set up for a dinner. The smaller room looks pretty much the same.

Reasons we decided against Mellwood included:
-Too expensive, which was OK but not ideal
-A little outside of downtown Louisville, which was OK but not ideal; I really wanted to our guests to get a feel for the city, and not come to a brand new city just to go to "some building" that could be situated anywhere.
-We would have to have the wedding in the smaller room, and it's very likely the larger room would also get rented, and we didn't like the idea of a bigger (although not necessarily better) party going on across the hall (also a reason we weren't big fans of a hotel wedding).

Nevertheless, although we decided not to use Mellwood, we were very happy when we left our site visit, because it meant we had chosen our venue!