The Village Green Of Cashiers — Attraction in Highlands

If you read no further, please know the following:

There is a big building project planned on site for Spring 2017 - do not book a wedding here unless you're willing to deal with a construction site.

If you choose to work with the Village Green, assume that you are not management’s priority, that they will take over a week to respond to important queries and will leave out important facts that have major impact on your event. Ask every question you can think of and then ask 10 more.

The Village Green Commons is a beautiful park with an awesome open air pavilion in the middle of beautiful Cashiers, NC. My fiancee and I visited in May 2016 and loved it enough to book our wedding there for May 2017.

Fast forward to October 2016. We had a cousin’s wedding in Cashiers, so we took the opportunity to meet with vendors and do walk-throughs. On a walk-through we ran into the Executive Director, Ann Self. We had a pleasant conversation and asked her some questions. All good. Next day, we came back and again ran into Ann, asked her some questions, all good.

As we were turning to walk away, she said, "oh, by the way, I told you about the construction right?" She had not. She had failed to mention that they are building a 6,000 square foot pavilion 10 feet in front of where we were planning to stand to get married. Had we known this, we never would have booked our wedding there.

In addition to not mentioning this important piece of information, it was clear that Ann had not considered the impact of the construction on weddings or events in any way and was not interested in helping. No thought of piping and draping (which she wanted us to pay for), no thought of how to stage equipment so wedding pictures didn't have backhoes in them, no timeline on when the construction would begin or end, no thoughts on how to manage without a working water line to the catering area. Her suggestion was to maybe just turn the wedding around to face the opposite direction from the construction.

We asked Ann for our money back and she sent only the deposit, and then dragged her feet for 2 months over refunding the full amount (with several 2 week gaps in responding to emails and calls), even trying to charge us a check cancellation fee after she sent our check to the wrong address.

Enjoy the park for walks, but don’t plan events there. They will be full of frustration...

MANAGEMENT IS VERY RUDE AND UNPROFESSIONAL. If you have the opportunity to take your event to another park, DO IT!!! We had our wedding ceremony, reception, and rehearsal all in the same park and were VERY DISSAPOINTED. The rehearsal dinner was in the smaller pavilion and when we arrived, the entire area reeked of MENURE. It was almost unbearable and honestly it was embarrassing because all of our friends and family had to put up with the smell. When we contacted them, their excuse was "it's a public park and we had to do it some time." Well if that’s your excuse, then do not charge a fee to rent it out to the public. That simple. Or at least let people know that you are laying down hundreds of pounds of fertilizer BEFORE they rent the space. The next day, we had our wedding in the Village Green. I will say that the campus was nice, but the bathrooms were FILLED WITH MOLD and they agreed to provide a fire pit but never came through on their end of the agreement. We bought a ton of firewood and materials for smores, but could never use what we bought. After the wedding, they charged us our ENTIRE SECURITY DEPOSIT even though they had fallen short of our agreement. They said there was a trash bag out and the caterer parked on the lawn. Well the lawn was already torn up from other events (trust me, i can see it in all of our pictures), and how hard is it to throw away a bag of trash? Ann had no explanation as to why she needed the whole deposit, but charged it anyways. When we approached them about it, they had very sour attitudes. PLEASE TREAD CAREFULLY. These guys are crooks. 1 star for the location. 0 stars...

I wouldn’t recommend booking this as a wedding ceremony/reception venue! My sister went back and forth with this place for a few weeks with questions and such regarding booking. Several things. 1. The venue isn’t honest about what’s included and the cost. We were emailed a proposal that said table cloths were included and they weren’t. 2. After discussing cost, we were LATER informed that it would be an extra $800 for another wedding coordinator. Unfortunately, this is a beautiful place but very unorganized and dishonest.

When my sister confronted about this miscommunication, the person of contact stated they would not do her wedding and said “We apologize you received an outdated proposal.” Unprofessional.. If you are sending potential clients information, It should be accurate. What a...