If you are considering Sandon Manor for your wedding venue, I beg you: scratch it off your list now. Yes, the house and grounds are beautiful, but the people behind it are absolutely awful. They ruined our wedding experience.
I will get straight to it. Sandon Manor has a very strict policy on guests leaving the site by 11:30pm (and no one is allowed back to the Manor unless they’re official guests staying overnight). We had lots of international guests at our wedding. Many hadn’t seen each other in years and would be jetlagged - we thought they may be keen to continue chatting after 11:30pm. With this in mind, we made a booking with Sandon Village Hall via our contacts at the church (where we were attending services and later married). They granted us access to the village hall until 1am as a contingency spill over space.
We mentioned this in passing during our online meeting with one of the Sandon Manor team a month before our wedding. Within hours, I received a voicemail from the lady in charge of Village Hall bookings saying (quote) “someone at Sandon Manor is trying to throw a spanner into the works for you”. It soon transpired that they had raised an official complaint to the parish council and pressurised the village hall team into cancelling our booking. To be clear, Sandon village Hall and Sandon Manor are entirely separate entities – there is no crossover between them whatsoever, as the owner of Sandon Manor later acknowledged.
It gets worse. Gob smacked, we asked Kate – the owner of Sandon Manor – for a call to find out what was going on. She was abhorrent, trying to justify her meddling as a necessary measure to protect her wedding license (side note: with Sandon Manor it is always about the money – once your deposit is paid they care nothing for your ‘special day’; you are just another cash cow). Did she apologise for stabbing us, her clients, in the back? No, she did not. She could not even fathom how hurt we were by being completely bypassed in the communication chain and how deceitful and disrespectful this was. My husband and I were quite literally left speechless. We’ve never experienced this sort of treatment from anyone, let alone our wedding venue - to whom we were paying many thousands of pounds. Dealing with this stress in the final month of wedding prep really took its toll on us and soured things. We no longer looked forward to our day, rather dreaded what Sandon Manor might do next.
Aside from this major incident, there were many other occasions when Sandon Manor were unhelpful and unfeeling in their interactions with us:
- We enquired if it would be possible to arrange a large pizza takeaway order instead of using Sandon Manor’s caterer for our late night food. One of the team explained on a call that this wasn’t contractually possible; we acknowledged this. We then received an email saying ‘If you are unable to follow this or any other of our T&C's we would be happy to cancel your booking.’ This was less than a month before our wedding.
- We had a harpist perform in the church. We were told she wasn’t allowed to play during our drinks reception in the grounds due to potential noise complaints (an acoustic harp at 2pm in the afternoon). No other music was permitted outside the house.
- Sandon Manor is an incredibly expensive (in hindsight, grossly overpriced) venue. But we were also hit with hidden fees when booking their accommodation option - an extra £425 ‘cleaning fee’ was added to our bill.
- At the time of booking, Sandon was running a promotion waivering the £700 fee for hiring their ceremony space. As we were marrying at the church, we asked if it would please be possible to put this towards other elements of our day i.e. using their festoon string of lights in the barn (for which they charge £450). They refused.
- We were unsure about booking the 1-bed Dovecote on the grounds as - at £499 for the weekend - it was a considerable expense. While we were deciding Sandon Manor rented it out on Air BnB (to one of our guests, which made for a very awkward conversation).
To summarise, you only get one wedding day. Kate and her team absolutely ruined ours. There are so many other lovely venues in north Hertfordshire run by decent, humane people. Please prioritise your happiness and choose wisely. I wish we had.