St. Francis Hall

It’s been said, SFH is a hidden gem and it’s true. When you get there and walk inside the Hall as especially around the Monestary grounds and gardens, you’re transformed to another world. Forget you’re in DC. We fell in love with it the moment we stepped foot here, so we booked it for our wedding reception.
Considering it’s in DC, the rental fee is really reasonable and includes tables and chairs. The other pluses to this venue: You can lay it out however you’d like, bring in your own caterer and alcohol, and there’s a TON of parking.
The venue is run by 2 part-​time staff: Cara who runs the paperwork side from home & Pedro who is on-​site for walk throughs and during events. When we first looked at the venue, we met Xhemil whom we heard great things about, but we never saw him again after that. We’re not sure what happened to him, but he seemed to run a tight ship, which is what previous reviewers on WeddingWire had said.
Given the part-​time staff, we tried to work in advance of deadlines. Unfortunately, we still had a lot of problems with communication throughout the process leading up to and even after the wedding.
Cara and Pedro do not seem to communicate because she wasn’t aware that we had conducted our walk through 3 months before the wedding. She also followed up and asked for paperwork and requirements that we’d already sent her. Given that, I will say that Cara was always very nice and pleasant to work with.
For our walk through, I’d told Cara a few days before that were planning on going so she could give them a heads up since you can’t make an appointment (instead you go during a scheduled open house). Pedro was there, had no idea we were coming, & wasn’t able to answer several of our questions that we had.
On our wedding day, Katie (our wedding coordinator) later told us that it was really difficult to find Pedro, and, after her and her assistant had, he’d told them he was going out for a couple of hours so he wouldn’t be available. Several of the things he was supposed to do before the reception started wasn’t done — even things as simple as turning on the decorative lights. When you’re the on-​site person for a venue DURING an event, how can you say that you won’t be available during it?! I don’t understand.
After the wedding, Katie and our caterer did a walk through with Pedro to ensure everything was okay (per SFH’s requirements). Unfortunately, St. Francis Hall has no paper trail for this — such as a checklist marking off everything that is okay and noting any potential damage with present parties. Instead it’s he said/​she said. Even though we had a month until we received our deposit back, we’d contacted Cara two weeks after the wedding to see if there had been any issues. She told us no, that everything was good to go. Katie confirmed this too. However, we then received a notice a few days later that there was a single broken wooden window slate, and they were going to charge us over $ 200 to repair it!
Since my father’s name was on the contract, he corresponded with Friar, who was dismissive and rude when my father was simply trying to get an explanation as to why this was only now coming up when we’d been given the clear. We finally caved and stopped pushing the Friar when he threatened to never allow Katie or our caterer to work at their venue again. We didn’t think this was fair, so we backed off. Strangely, we still got our full deposit back after the month.
As you can tell, there is a serious lack of communication and processes in place for St. Francis Hall. It’s really a shame because it’s so beautiful and we did have an amazing wedding reception here, and our photos came out incredible. I hope things improve and change here as the venue has so much potential, and it’s also getting more popular as more people are discovering it.
So 5 stars for the uniqueness and beauty of the venue and property, but deducted two stars for the unnecessary stress added due to the disorganization and lack of communication on SFH side.