Why 50 to 125, and not 300.

Every hall we ever rented was built for somebody else’s wedding. Eighty people in a room made for three hundred feels like a rehearsal: the empty places photograph louder than the full ones, and the DJ ends up playing to a dance floor sized for a crowd that was never coming.

The arithmetic runs the same way in the other direction. A room that has to fill three hundred places has to charge like a room for three hundred, and that is where mandatory catering and food minimums come from. Once the food is carrying the rent, the menu stops being about your family. I’m not going to solve that problem by getting bigger; the only fix is to stay small enough that the room pays for itself on the rental alone.

So the cap is the promise, not something we’re apologising for. Sizing a room to the guest list, instead of asking the guest list to grow into the room, is the whole decision, and nearly everything else on this site follows from it. If your list runs to three hundred, Brampton has halls that do that well. If it’s 50 to 125, that’s the room we’re building — and the longer version of this argument has the numbers in it.