Seating chart for two different rooms

[zoebartlett]

Our venue for the wedding and the reception is a restaurant. The area where the reception will be has two different rooms separated by french doors and windows. It almost seems as if the second room was an add-on at some point in time (I''m not sure though). The second room has a deck off of it. I was told that based on the size of our guest list, we''ll definitely need to use both rooms. The only problem is that I don''t want guests to feel segregated. So, who should I put in this second room? We''re not going to have many children in attendance but we''re not sure how many we could have either (MAYBE around 5-10 kids under . Should I put families with these children in there? Should I put some smokers in there so the have easy access to the deck? I guess I''m looking for ideas of how to make this second room not feel so separated from where the action will be. Any ideas?

 

[Fancy605]

Hi! It sounds like your hall is set up similarly to ours. Ours contained two ball rooms: one downstairs, and one up a flight of like 6 stairs. They are separated only by their height and some columns and open windows. Even though they are very open to each other, I had a similar concern. Now, I will go ahead and say that the ONLY time the seating arrangement mattered is during dinner. After dinner: during first dances and general dancing, etc, everyone migrated to the upper ballroom (where the dance floor was), and the seating plan was forgotten (which is good because it was mainly in place so that the servers knew where to put which plates of food, so after dinner no one cared). It ended up being nice too b/c when guests were tired of being around the dancing, they could retreat to the lower ball room (which is where the restrooms and bar and cake were, so it worked out pretty well) Plus, the open-ness of the rooms helped. But, because we didn''t realize it wouldn''t be a big deal, we decided to do the following:

We arranged it so that the head table was in the lower ballroom and the dance floor was in the upper ballroom. That way we could be with guests in both rooms at some point during the night.

We put our younger college-y type friends in the upper ballroom near the dace floor b/c they were more likely to dance and want to be part of the partying the whole night and because they really wouldn''t care about being in the same area as us during dinner. Plus, we kept different groups seated near each other, so they were apt to have fun no matter what.

Then we put all of our family members/older crowd/people with kids in the lower ball room because they would more likely care to mingle with us during dinner. plus, they would more likely want to retreat from the dance floor than our younger guests so that they could all socialize and such.

Anyway, it ended up working out better than I could have dreamed.

 

[somethingshiny]

I would put smokers next to the deck. They''ll appreciate the efficiency, your guests in the other room will appreciate not having the smelly smoke on them, and the families with children won''t feel like they''re being shunned.