Jon and Trisha had their dream wedding on the horizon.
They’d found a beautiful farm in coastal Rhode Island.
Picked out a weekend in August. Anticipating a guest count around 150,
including Trisha’s family from her native New York and Jon’s family from
southern Indiana. Singing, dancing, drinking. All the usual festivities.
“But all that changed once March approached,” Trisha said on
August 14 under the dome at West Baden Springs Hotel, which became the new
venue for the couple’s scaled-down ceremony. “I’m actually glad it turned out
this way, because we get to have a very intimate ceremony with all of our very
close, immediate family members and then have the big celebration for next year.”
“We planned another wedding in essentially like a month or so. I’m quite impressed with myself,” she adds with a laugh. And in her mind, West Baden was hardly a Plan B. “This is a great Plan A option. This is a beautiful hotel, and Jon and I are pretty blessed with having this as our plan.”
Their new wedding at West Baden included 20 people — family only, plus a best man and maid of honor — perfect for an outdoor ceremony on the veranda, followed by a cocktail hour and dinner indoors in the closed-off hotel lobby. Welcome to weddings in the COVID-19 era, where plans often get turned on their head but French Lick Resort has become a safety net for couples scrambling to rearrange their big day.
In Jon and Trisha’s case, they knew about West Baden Springs Hotel as Jon’s family lives 30 minutes away, and they took Trisha there on some of her first visits to Indiana. “We’ve always come to West Baden over the holidays. The tree would be in the center of the atrium, we’d grab dinner in the rest here, and we just loved how beautiful the hotel was,” she said.
But some have looked into West Baden as a new wedding venue
after hearing about it for the first time.
Jennifer Ryal is a Senior Meeting & Event Planning
Manager who plans weddings at West Baden Springs Hotel, and a woman from Ohio
contacted her this summer about moving her wedding here. The soon-to-be bride
had never visited West Baden. Never even heard of it. When the original venue
informed her they wouldn’t be able to hold the wedding because of capacity
limits for large events, they recommended West Baden. She got online, did some
research, and loved what she saw.
It was a familiar story at the outset of the wedding season,
especially from couples in neighboring states where things are reopening at a
slower rate.
“We were getting least 10 of those phone calls a week, if
not more. It’s pretty crazy,” Ryal said. “We’ve had a lot of people reaching
out trying to relocate — as big as 300 people and as small as just the couple
themselves.”
Outdoor venues, as you’d expect, have been popular. The formal gardens at both West Baden and French Lick Springs Hotels are favorite sites for wedding ceremonies. The French Lick gardens and West Baden veranda are also capable of hosting dinner functions, for an entirely outdoor event. The Pete Dye Pavilion and Stables Pavilion boast outdoor ceremony space and outdoor cocktail areas.
Couples like Jon and Trisha who ditched their bigger plans
for a more intimate wedding are feeling right at home at West Baden, because “we’re
used to working this way,” Ryal said. “Especially at West Baden, many weddings
are smaller, more intimate groups – something that’s more like a really nice
dinner, and maybe some background music. That’s definitely kind of our gig. French
Lick Springs Hotel handles the bigger wedding parties on a more regular basis.”
Those bigger events do have their limits, Ryal stresses to
her clients, even as Indiana continues reopening bit by bit. For example, a
resort venue that can accommodate 300 people in normal times may now be limited
to around half that size to account for social distancing.
Trisha acknowledged it was an emotional roller coaster to
reroute her original wedding plans she’d spent more than a year on. But she
rolled with the changes, found a new hair and makeup stylist out of Louisville,
and a new photographer out of Evansville.
She had to scrap those original wedding invitations, too.
But Trisha found that her East Coast friends and family had the same reaction
she did the first time she stepped inside West Baden Springs Hotel and took a
look around.
“Oh my gosh, this is really nice. The first time I saw
West Baden, I was amazed,” Trisha recalled.
“I think West Baden and French Lick is a hidden gem that a lot of out-of-state people are not aware of. After today, our friends from Connecticut will go back and say, ‘Hey you should visit this hotel and take pictures to post on Instagram.’ I think you’re going to have a lot more weddings here.”