The Event Center at Sam Hill Warehouse

I took a tour of the warehouse and fell in love. The sales person had dozens of photos with different decorations and answered all my questions. She was on target with all her recommendations; including designating someone to be my point person for the morning of my wedding. That made things more relaxed for me and my wedding party. My family appreciated being able to stay at their hotel too. My grandmother needed to leave the party earlier than others and it was a quick walk across the bridge. I used the bridge for my wedding ceremony and we have the best pictures. The meal was good, the service was great, it was a happy day.

I want to start off by giving this an honest review. There is SOOO much about this venue that I love and our wedding was absolutely BEAUTIFUL! But also so much went wrong due to management.

Pros: The Venue! The bridge/cocktail area, and reception area is just absolutely breathtaking. I can’t say enough about how my photos turned out etc that it was just beautiful and amazing.
FOOD- food is phenomenal. The chef and kitchen staff should be recognized because we got soo many compliments on how good the food was.
Flexible- the venue did accommodate some last minute changes for me of adding a table and rearranging some of my table seating and final plans.
Responsive- Overall, the management team was responsive to emails leading up the day.

Cons:
Brides room - one desk one mirror, no natural light and dated furniture. It needs a remodel desperately it doesn’t match the elevation of the rest of the venue.
Food- our guests ran out of food and we had children/we had 8 no shows and still ran out of food for last two tables.
Wedding coordinator - told we would have one and then that was removed 30 days ahead of wedding.
Hotel room- hotel room is not included in price.
Bar/food/etc- if you do food through them you can’t bring in any outside vendor for food aside from cake. EVERYTHING IS CHANGED ON HEADCOUNT CONSUMPTION. There are no flat fees or paying for a certain amount. You pay your guest count and by consumption. It was very limiting but we did agree to this upfront so nothing that was a surprise to us and was in our contract. (Just not as advantageous as other venues menu/bar options).
Summary:
our contract/booking of this place started with a day of coordinator being included in the price. After we signed our contract and were a month away, we were told it would be 1200 more for that and because they told us they would have it the sales manager Kavita would assume that role and take care of it. The only thing I can say is if you hire this venue, you need to hire a day of coordinator. Do not rely on Kavita or the team being able to do it. Soooo much went wrong and was missed due to not having that. So biggest tip if you hire this vendor- is hire an outside wedding planner. Some things that were missed- execution of detail items, I bought cocktail toppers that were never placed out, I bought wedding coloring books and games that were never given to the kids, my advice wedding cards were never taken out of the price tag packaging, etc. little things that added up.
Cocktail hour- the purpose of this hour is to give the bride and groom time for photos. The team never cleared the bridge of all the chairs so we didn’t get a chance to get any additional photos on the bridge. During our hour, the sales manager interrupted our photographer to ask me and my husband questions four times. It was very frustrating to not have the time to get photos in.

Flowers- I had the most beautiful arch and flowers. The management requested for my family to help love the arch into the reception space from the bridge. Additionally, when the wedding was over the team threw every last flower away. My husbands and I went to pick up the arch at 7am the next morning and they had thrown it in the trash.

When the wedding ended the team again had my family help clean up in addition, my family kept calling me to ask me questions because the team didn’t know what to do with all the items. Again something a planner would have taken care of. I had everything I owned/everything mapped out in a detail book for the team of what needed to be boxed back up for personal items and what wasn’t. Overall, the last thing you want to hear after you leave your wedding is what to do with your stuff and get phone calls till 11 at night. It was super disappointing.

I can’t list everything that went right or wrong it was just super disappointing for me as a bride on what is the most important day and to have so many things go wrong. As brides you put a lot of time and effort into making the day everything you dreamed and to spend time and money on things you’ll never get back was really hard. If you hire a planner and don’t go with their day of coordination option, I think it will execute flawlessly and you’ll love it. Because again, aside from my last two tables running out of food, the food was amazing and the venue is beautiful. I believe the venue will update the contract after our experience, but this venue needs to reevaluate the management of events such as a wedding. They aren’t prepared for what it takes to execute on a wedding. I wish I could honestly work for them and help them with weddings and their marketing. I will say post wedding I had a discussion and in efforts to make things right the venue offered some money off our last payment and comped our hotel room. It doesn’t make up for how the day went, but it at least took away some of the sting of frustration.

Brides- beautiful venue, outline your contract ahead of time, and GET A WEDDING COORDINATOR OR PLANNER!

If I could write a review for the venue that excluded the event coordinator, this would be a five star review. The venue itself is beautiful and rustic with a ton of charm. The bridge was a highlight and we loved the option to perform the ceremony on the bridge.

The restaurant at the hotel was excellent, all the food was really top notch, much better than we expected for wedding food.

The Achilles heel for this venue was the event coordinator, Kavita:

She was extremely unprofessional and difficult to get ahold of from the beginning of the planning process, with sometimes multiple emails/phone calls required before we received a reply.

She completely forgot the date of our food tasting which ended up in 4 hours of drive time for nothing.

She gave us a quote for room blocking at the hotel that was MORE expensive than the rates we found on booking.com and other hotel sites for SINGLE rooms.

She refused to allow us to keep the flowers for the wedding in the bridal room downstairs the night before the wedding even though we were the only event in the space for the entire weekend.

After OUR families spent most of the night before and the entire morning of the wedding preparing the warehouse for the reception with ZERO help, and after she assured us that the space was ours for the day, she walked another couple through the space a few hours before our wedding reception.

She refused to block off pedestrian traffic on the bridge during the rehearsal, resulting in some tense confrontations with strangers pushing their way through the rehearsal ceremony.

After telling us we were below budget and could add more food options, we were hit with a $1500 bill at the end of it all due to menu choices.


I wish again that I could express how much we appreciated the rest of the staff of the hotel/restaurant/event center and how hard they all worked to make our wedding day special. The space was beautiful, and the day was great, but not in any way because of the event coordinator, in spite of her.