I just want to lament for a moment...
We really wanted to host our vow renewal at the same venue we got married. It was a beautiful venue and very unique, and I've never seen anything in my state that I liked anywhere near as much.
I went today to go look at it again and I am just... so bummed.
I realize we got married a long time ago. It will have been two decades when we go to have our vow renewal.
But gosh...
They changed the landscaping dramatically. For the curious, it's the Maitland Art Center Mayan Chapel and Courtyard. If you look on Google images (or even their own website), you will find all these beautiful photos where the chapel is full of lush ferns and little flowering bushes. They've ripped all of those out. The "altar" area has a chessboard stone pattern, which had recesses that gave an obvious pattern in photos - they've filled those in with mulch and ugly little shrubs. There is a pathway that runs between the chapel and courtyard that was covered in that same lush greenery, and that's all gone. The chapel area went from looking like Mayan ruins tucked in a lush, secret forest to just... plain stone. This is closest to what it looked like when we got married: https://www.artfixdaily.com/images/c/1c/ea/Oct29_studio900x414.jpg Now imagine ALL of that greenery - along the sides, behind the altar, even coming over the chapel wall on the right (that's the hallway) is gone. Even the two grassy areas in front in that photo, which were full of white flowering bushes when we got married, are just mulch now. It doesn't even look like the photos they have posted in their lookbook on their site anymore.
They added these extremely modern wall sconces throughout the covered areas that don't match the aesthetic at all. They also added strings of ultra-modern light bulbs over the reception courtyard - which appear to be permanent fixtures, as they put up big wooden poles to support them. I know that lighting was a struggle previously, because they didn't provide lighting at all in the chapel/courtyard. I just feel like they did this without respect to the overall look of the place. These look like they belong in an industrial/urban space, not a Mayan revival art studio from the 1920s.
If you read this far, thanks. I'm just sad. This kind of knocked the wind out of my sails today. 
I know it's a dumb thing to be sad about, because they have the right to do anything to the place they want to (and I'm sure all those things were done for good reason - the plants might have been damaging the stone, they might have been hard to care for...) but this place was so special to us and we were so excited to host our vow renewal there... walking in and immediately thinking "I don't remember it being so ugly?" made me so sad.
