I know I’m getting bad at updating the blog, but I promise that once our venue is confirmed, the posts will start rolling again!

So the big surprise venue that we have been seeing is… The Westin Prince, formerly known as the Prince Hotel. This place completely came out of left field – no one even knew it was in the running! I didn’t either. I knew it existed, but I never thought to check it out. Then one day last week, I was doing searches on Toronto hotels and came across a forum where someone said they had their reception at the Westin Prince, and it had been recently renovated. Those were golden words.

I couldn’t find any images online of the ballroom, except for one crappy little one on their website. It didn’t look promising at all, but I decided to give them a call. I spoke with the Director of Catering, and she told me they just finished a 2-year, $20-million dollar renovation on the ground and lower ground floors. They didn’t have any photos of the new space yet, so we’d have to go in and see it for ourselves (the photo on their site is the old ballroom – PHEW).

J and I didn’t have any high expectations since, really, all of our hopes were shattered by pretty much every venue we saw. We still had not been wowed. So when we got to the Westin Prince we were more than pleasantly surprised. The lobby was brand new, urban and chic – similar to the Hyatt Regency. By the time we got to the ballroom, we were drooling. The ballroom… I think it actually wowed us. Maybe it was the low expectations, or the fact that it’s beautifully neutral, contemporary yet grande, but I think we immediately knew that this was the place.

So my photo obviously don’t do it justice, but I know you all want to see this lovely space, so here is a pic of the ballroom:

The main ballroom, in its raw state

Neutral colours! Large capacity! Carpet with no creepy floral designs! Cool chandeliers! Wainscotting! Man, this place has it all (except for windows – but we’ve got the huge cocktail space for that). We can even do our ceremony outside. I can’t believe we never saw this hotel before, but I’m glad it all worked out. Best of all? They have our date!!