Our full and honest experience
We hired this venue around a year in advance for a weekend wedding in July 2024 after visiting twice and meeting with Anneka on both occasions. We had a mostly positive experience, with some room for improvement. We have tried to give a fair and balanced review and hope this is helpful to both the venue and potential future bookings.
Positives
1. Overall venue - We hired the entire estate, including all 3 cottages next to the grange, allowing us to host 26 guests over a weekend perfectly. The main grange building and surrounding grounds are truly breathtaking and beautiful. Every guest commented on how grand and amazing the venue was. We fell in love with the place from our very first visit and knew it would suit us and our small family weekend wedding get together perfectly.
2. Bedrooms - Each bedroom was perfectly presented with robes, towels and toiletries provided. Clean and comfortable rooms, with fantastic views of the estate. Travel cots and high chairs were offered to guests with children and extra supplies (such as shaving foam) was provided on request. Only guests staying in the cottages will have any distance to walk, but 5 minutes at most. We left gift bags on every bed for guest arrivals with a bottle of water as this is not provided.
3. DIY Friendly - We opted to mostly arrange everything ourselves, from the caterers, drinks, entertainment and marquee. Anneka offered some suggested and previous suppliers to the venue, but as long as they had public liability insurance, we could basically hire any suppliers we wanted.
This was great for us as we felt in control and could hire the suppliers we wanted, communicating with them directly. However, Anneka did liaise with some suppliers herself to discuss some smaller details, which we appreciated.
4. Dog Friendly - There are not many venues that are truly dog friendly, without any restrictions on where dogs can go. It was very important to us that our dogs could be part of our wedding and that guests could bring their dog without any worries and is one of the main reasons we chose this venue. They lived up to their word and we had 5 dogs over the weekend that had a fantastic time free roaming the grounds and venue coming and going between guests as they pleased. One of our dogs sadly passed away only 2 weeks after the wedding and we are forever grateful that one of his final memories was to spend a weekend here, unrestricted and treated like one of the family that he was.
5. Help with guests and caterers - We paid extra to have Anneka there for the weekend helping with guests and suppliers and are glad we did. We felt reassured that guests could speak to Anneka if they needed anything who always offered friendly help whenever needed. She worked well with the caterers especially to make sure everything was done correctly and on time, meaning we didn’t have to ever worry about food service.
6. Dealt with supplier issues - One of the suppliers Anneka agreed to take charge of was table, chair, linen and cutlery hire. Although we did have to chase several times regarding this and felt it was all organised a little late for our liking, she did come through in the end. The supplier delivered the wrong colour linens which she completely dealt with and sorted without us having to worry which was great.
7. Sound system - The main building has a pretty decent Sonos sound system dotted around several rooms and the outside area. I believe there were 8 zones in total. This allowed us to turn up with an iPad, load up our Spotify playlist and connect to their system, easily controlling the volume in each zone. We left this plugged into a socket in a side room we could access any time which allowed us to have background music the entire weekend without any issue.
8. Housekeeping - We met several long-term housekeepers who were very friendly and helpful the entire weekend. They even gave a tour to our parents and showed them where everything was. They helped us drop off some items Thursday night and made us feel welcome.
Negatives
1. Slow & poor comms - Unfortunately we found Anneka was often very slow to respond to messages, sometimes taking weeks, requiring us to chase several times to get an answer to often quite urgent queries. This was the case from the time of booking all the way up to the wedding, roughly a 1 year period.
This added unnecessary stress to an already stressful situation of trying to organise multiple suppliers for the event who all had their own deadlines and were chasing us for decisions and answers. This never really improved, even in the final month which was very frustrating at times. When you’re spending this much money, I think it’s only fair to expect a reply to any queries within a few days maximum.
2. Double booking - We had a weekend wedding from Friday to Sunday. We arrived early on Friday to start setting up before guests arrived to find venue tours had been arranged with another family. This left us feeling slightly awkward and restricted as we couldn't freely access the venue as we wanted. There were still people walking around as guests arrived although thankfully not for long. We do not feel like a tour should have been booked on the first day of our wedding so this was disappointing.
3. Garden work - Again on Friday, as we were setting up some lawn games for our guests all the mowers and strimmers came out, causing lawn clippings to be blown all over our games that I had to ask to be cleaned. They were still gardening as guests arrived which was noisy and messy. Again, I feel this should have been done before Friday when they knew we would be setting up and guests would start arriving.
4. Bedroom windows - Several guests were unable to open their windows in both the Grange and cottages. One of the bedrooms above the kitchen did not have any blind or covering in front of their window which allowed light in much earlier than the guest would have liked. We understand it is a slightly awkward shaped window, but still, something should be installed to block light from all bedroom windows without any issues opening them.
Mixed
1. Ice - We told Anneka in advance that we would need lots of ice to fill all the ice buckets for drinks we wanted. On arrival we found only a few bags of ice which was nowhere near enough to set up. An hour before guests arrived we still had no ice which again added unnecessary stress as we couldn't set up our drink displays with cold drinks in advance. Eventually, last minute the ice arrived and we were able to finish setting up. I felt like I had to manage the ice myself as they just weren't adding enough to the drink displays. However, once they realised how much we needed, I will say they did a good job at keeping the ice freezer stocked with plenty of ice for the rest of the weekend. They even allowed our external cocktail supplier on Saturday night to use as much ice as they needed which was very nice and much appreciated. So started bad, but came through in the end.
2. Fire pits - We fired these up on Friday night for guests to cosy up around which they loved. Blankets were also available to hand out which was a nice touch. However, we were unable to get the fire pits working again on Saturday and one of the cottages that had a fire pit table had a missing gas canister (we were told it was no longer a working fire pit). Fixing these issues and ensuring every fire pit was in working order would have made the evenings extra special for our guests and should be a relatively easy fix.
3. Ceremony music - We created clearly labelled playlists for Anneka to play during each part of the ceremony (pre-ceremony, walking down the aisle, signing and exit). Unfortunately no music was played during the signing section which we had specially selected music for. We couldn’t really flag this at the time so had to carry on in silence. Also the wrong playlist was played momentarily for walking down the aisle. If it wasn’t clear what should be played at which point, this should have been raised before the ceremony to avoid this situation. Maybe a quick rehearsal on Friday before guests arrived would have been a good idea. Anyway, I’m sure the guests didn’t even notice, but we did and were slightly disappointed by this.
4. Deposit & Returns - Our damage deposit was returned in full, however past the 14 day deadline (around a month) and we had to chase several times to get this back. A few items were left by accident (Jacket and a few electrical items) which were very kindly posted back to us, however again, this also took some repeated chasing.
Conclusion
Overall we were very happy with the venue and had a fantastic, memorable experience. The negatives were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things and can be very easily improved for future bookings.
We have no regrets booking the Casterton Grange for our weekend wedding and have had mostly positive comments from our guests who all thoroughly enjoyed themselves and in most cases were completely oblivious to the small issues behind the scenes!
I would have no hesitation in recommending this venue to other people, especially if you have less than 30 guests and would like them to have overnight accommodation on the grounds. Plus, if you would like your family dogs to be part of your wedding, it’s a no brainer.
With better communication, no other tours / gardening arranged during the weekend and a few other small improvements, it would have been close to perfect. However, we take away very fond and happy memories that we will remember the most.
Casterton Grange Estate
Foray Catering
