I have carried buckets through a freight door at six in the morning and through a wrought-iron gate an hour later, and after enough of both you stop thinking of Los Angeles wedding venues as backdrops. They are rooms with opinions. A ceiling thirty feet up will swallow a low centerpiece whole. A courtyard that is already in bloom will argue with anything you bring that tries to out-flower it. The room asks for something before anyone has said a word about palette.
What follows is not a ranking. It is what two very different places have taught me about what to load into the van.
The Industrial Room
Millwick sits on East 4th Place in the Arts District, in a building put up in the 1940s as a livery for the downtown trade and later run as cold storage. Marvimon took it over in 2014 and left the bones alone. The Grand Hall still has its wooden bow truss ceiling, studded with skylights, and the bathrooms are built into the old walk-in freezers.
Light like that comes from directly above and moves all afternoon, which flatters texture and is unkind to anything flat. I answer the trusses with height — branches, a tall vessel, something hung — because a room that tall reads a low table as an apology. The courtyard is a different problem. It already has mature trees, bamboo, birds of paradise against the original brick, and twenty-foot vertical gardens. There is more green there than I could ever bring, so I bring less of it. Form and color instead of foliage, and nothing that pretends to compete with an orange-and-blue flower growing six feet away.
The Garden Room
Across town, just over the river, the Los Angeles River Center & Gardens hides behind ivy-covered walls a few minutes from downtown. You come in through an arched iron gate onto a circular brick drive with a ficus at the center of it. The main courtyard is multi-level, held on three sides by arcaded terraces, with pepper trees, beds of roses and agapanthus and daylilies, terra cotta pots, and a three-tiered fountain standing in a tiled reflecting pool. The lawn in the San Fernando Courtyard, shaded by an old ficus, is where most ceremonies happen.
A garden this full asks for restraint, and it asks for warmth. Terra cotta and Mexican tile throw a red-brown cast over everything, and shade under a big ficus is green-tinted, so a cool white bouquet can come out looking slightly grey and slightly ill. Cream, apricot, dusty rose, a little rust. The place is already doing the flowering. My job is to agree with it.
Reading Los Angeles Wedding Venues Before You Order
Whatever the venue, I ask couples to walk it once at the hour their ceremony starts, not at the hour the tour was offered. Light at four is not light at eleven. Near the coast the marine layer can hold grey until noon well into June, which is lovely for photographs and quietly changes which whites work. By late September the light has gone long and amber, and a Santa Ana can dry out soft petals outdoors faster than anyone expects — one reason I lean on protea, ranunculus with some substance to it, and anything that grew up in a dry summer.
Three things worth noting while you are there: how high the ceiling actually goes, how the flowers get in the door, and what is already growing on site. The first tells me scale, the second tells me what is buildable, and the third tells me what to leave at the studio.
If you are walking venues this season and want a second pair of eyes on the light, come find us — the Flower Van on Abbot Kinney most weekends, or the studio. Bring a photograph taken at the right time of day, and we will start there.
