The Holly Farm is a truly special place, it's difficult to put it into words. My then fiance and I stepped onto the grounds a year and a half before the event and knew immediately that this was the venue that felt the most us. Every other venue we looked at suddenly looked like crap!
We wanted to throw the best party of our lives, to have our favorite people in one place for a whole weekend, to have the whole wedding flow organically from moment to moment. We didn't want a place that felt fake, that's the main thing. And when you see the Holly Farm, it really feels like you've stepped into a genuine and intimate paradise.
The planning for the wedding was a breeze. Everyone kept asking me if I felt overwhelmed by the wedding planning, and I honestly replied that it was the easiest event I've ever planned. Partly that was because I chose to keep things very simple. But also, it's because the Holly Farm makes it so easy. You really don't need a wedding planner, which is some budget that you can devote to anything else you want. While I kept things simple, the wedding was very much us. We tailored the menu, the alcohol, the music, each individual event, the flowers, basically all the individual components, to create a vision that was completely personalized. The Holly Farm is so distinctive and unique, but it's very easy to imprint your own personality on it, so that each wedding is quite distinct.
I went with all the suggested vendors except the photographers, because I found one close to home that I loved. The food, the flowers, and the alcohol, the DJ, were beyond fantastic. But of course, what made it all come to life was the Holly Farm itself; the Moses family who gently guided me along the way, and their incredible staff, Rosa, Gus, Gus Jr. and Sylvester who unobtrusively kept the whole weekend humming.
Even before the actual big day, our family and friends were amazed. Our best friends stayed with us at the venue and kept telling us that it felt like an incredible vacation, and it was a very special treat to spend so much time with our friends. The houses each have their own special personality, and you feel completely taken care of every moment. We held a barbeque for anyone who wanted to come the day before the wedding and had it on the lawn with a blues band. Along with a special family dinner, the BBQ, and the wedding, we also had a little caravan of people that headed over to the beach for a bonfire the night before the wedding. At the BBQ on the lawn, our guests loved playing bocce, throwing footballs around, croquet, hanging out on the picnic blankets with their babies, eating delicious food from La Creme, and generally kicking back. Some of them spent some time exploring the grounds a bit, and everyone kept saying "it's so beautiful, I feel like I'm in Hawaii!" stuff like that. But I don't think anyone was prepared for the way the venue came together the next day.
As a logistical note, if you, like us, have guests with children, then you HAVE to invest in the babysitting. It meant parents could really party!
The day of the wedding was warm, sunny, and bright. The incredible orchids that scatter the grounds in profusion (and are an awesome bonus that cuts down on the floral bill), the lanterns, the flower laden chuppah, the fairy lights, the bright flowers and intense greenery, the meandering paths and little nooks that reveal themselves as you explore, well, it all create a feeling of a special world that is just created for you. It feels so perfect that it can't exist like this for more than one night. Even though our wedding was in October, people said it felt like a midsummer night's dream. I know I'm biased, of course, but that's also what it felt like to me, I felt like I stepped into a fairy land and a sort of explosion of happiness. Even though I'd spent time planning it all, the finished product and the culmination of all the little touches far exceeded my imagination.
I'm sure this happens at every wedding at Holly Farm, but our friends and family told us repeatedly that it was the best wedding they'd been to, the most beautiful, the best party, the most fun, most wonderful food, that it should be featured in a magazine, etc... Of course this is all so gratifying. But to us, the most incredible part about the Holly Farm is that it allowed us to create a wedding that not only lived up to what we had dreamed of, but that it so accurately represented our personalities and what we felt was unique about our love. This could only have happened at Holly Farm.
Finally, the morning after the wedding, we had a thank you brunch for any of the guests who could make it. Well, it should have been accurately called the hangover brunch. But the delicious spread and the lovely huge jugs of mimosas went a long way in erasing everyone's haziness. It was the perfect conclusion to our magical wedding.
Thank you to the Moses family and their staff for the best weekend of our lives! read more