Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Booked: Wedding Church - Archbishop's Palace

Yey! We were able to booked our church for December ? and that’s a Monday. It’s not because we expect less number of guests but aside from being an auspicious date, we rather have it on a Monday than Wednesday (best day of the week as per beliefs) or Friday. It would only require me and my fiancĂ© to file for leave atleast 2 days after the big day from our work. By the way, the price for weddings on December has the same rate for weekdays and weekends, and is the most expensive month in a year for this specific occasion, just FYI. Also, no afternoon weekend schedule is still available for all churches that we inquired.

Villa San Miguel or Archbishop’s Palace is located in Shaw Boulevard, Mandaluyong just beside Toyota. You need to access the 2nd gate (there are two gates in the Villa, one near the highway so just go to the upper gate) to ask the security guard for ocular inspection of the two chapels and talk to Brother Alex in the office. The office is open from 8-11:30am and 1:30-4:30pm Mondays-Fridays. You can check the chapels on weekdays and on Saturday until 11:30 am only.


I liked the altar of the small non-air-conditioned chapel which can accommodate 70 persons only. It is located at the right side once you enter the second gate. You need to go upstairs since the chapel is located in the second floor of that structure. I was not able to ask for the fee since we were targeting the bigger chapel.



The bigger air-conditioned chapel is worth 7,000 with 500 reservation fee which is not deductable to 7k. Then 1,000 pesos is required by the parish for the officiating priest’s stipend and another 1,500 should you prefer to have all seats covered with white linen. Of course you’d rather have it covered to look better in photos and in your actual ceremony. So total fee for the big chapel is 10,000 –there’s no priest, choir and flowers provided. The couple will shoulder these plus they allow simple flower arrangement (standees only). Rules are bit stricter compared to other churches including the clothing of guests and your entourage. Red carpet is included in your 7k fee. If you want a long aisle on your wedding march, you can ask them to extend it further with no extra charge. Inform the office, days before your wedding, that you will bring your flowers outside the villa after the ceremony (if you need it in your reception venue), since they will not allow it if you were not able to relay it to them.


The big chapel can accommodate 150 persons while the villa as a whole can fit in 40 cars, the most. Expect no other crowd would crash your ceremony except for the invited ones so overall, it’s really yours – private and secured.


Next steps, venue and caterer hunting…

2 comments:

  1. What's the duration of the wedding ceremony? 1 hour or 1.5 hours? Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi. It actually depends on your priest but they allow the use of the venue for 1.5 hours ONLY including photo ops.

    ReplyDelete