Have your wedding in the beautiful mountains of Northeastern Tennessee!

A more spiritual and beautiful location for a mountain wedding would be hard to come by. Mother Nature, the original florist, greets spring wedding guests at Sugar Hollow Retreat with blooms of dogwood and redbud, mountain laurel and flame azalea. The mountains tower over the retreat in the distance, reminding those gathered of the power of such a committment made before the Creator.

The Watauga Building has proven to be a great location for mountain weddings. The building itself has a large central area for gathering the guests, as well as kitchen and bathroom facilities that make it a wonderful reception venue.

Wedding guests find that the beauty of the natural Tennessee setting coincides with the beauty of the union. Weddings at Sugar Hollow have been described as "personal and romantic," setting off the importance of spending such occasions in touch with nature and loved ones.

Jennifer and Braden  August 2010

Slide Show Courtesy of Liam Photography 

Finding a Mountain Wedding

Andi Gelsthorpe Peters was at her wit’s end.

She and her fiancée, Rob, had searched high and low all over the North Carolina/Tennessee area for an outdoor wedding venue.

The couple, in their mid-thirties, had each been to dozens of weddings. They didn’t want to drag family from other states only to spend a few hours with them. They didn’t want everyone to drive back and forth from hotels to a rehearsal dinner to the wedding site back to a reception. They wanted to create a sense of community and spend time with everyone for a weekend.

But they couldn’t find the perfect place. Some venues were close, but too expensive or had strict rules.

“Someone wanted $10,000,” she said. “I thought we weren’t going to be able to do this.”

A friend suggested Sugar Hollow Retreat.

“We had passed the signs for it on 321, but we’d never been up there,” she said.

She and Rob drove up the road to take a peek at the 300-acre getaway in the Cherokee National Forest.

“When we saw it – the beauty of the 360-degree mountain view – we were sold,” she said. “I thought, ‘We want all our family and friends to stay here.’”

And when she heard she could have the entire place for much less than $10,000, her mouth dropped open.

“We were on,” she said. "I asked Jim, the innkeeper, to write us down on the calendar!"

Sure enough, Andi and Rob exchanged their vows at Sugar Hollow Retreat on Aug. 8, 2009.

More than 150 guests attended the wedding, held in a small valley with mountain views. Friends and family stayed at each of the four guesthouses, the Lodge, and conference center, all with multiple bedrooms, bathrooms and fully stocked kitchens. Andi said the guests enjoyed cooking meals together all weekend.

The flexibility to drop things off ahead of time was a big help, Andi said. Guests could also camp anywhere, set up their tents or pull in their RVs.

“There was plenty of room,” she said. “It was wide open. No one had to [leave the property] if they didn’t want to.”

Guests rode golf carts around the campus roads, allowing them to get from other guesthouses to the Lodge. One night, a local band played at the retreat’s outdoor amphitheater for the rehearsal party. With gorgeous views of the surrounding mountains, the amphitheater provided a perfect place for a star-filled night of entertainment.

To the couple's surprise, during the reception a climber set up a slackline and walked across it for all to enjoy. Lanterns lit up the event. The caterers had no trouble with an extra driveway and space behind the Lodge for kitchen access.

Andi said she couldn’t believe how flexible it all was, and most of all, they could stay up all night if they wanted to. Other places required them to finish by midnight, she said.

“When the band said they were done, that’s when the party ended,” she said. “With Sugar Hollow, the place is yours.”

Andi said the main word she would use to describe their experience was “genuine.”

 “People came from all across the country and all across our lives,” she said. “We wanted to create a sense of community and spend time with our family. That is what Sugar Hollow meant to us.”

“We could not ask for more.”

My Mountain Wedding

My parents thought I was crazy when I said I wanted a destination wedding. Their first thoughts were of Paris, Italy, or some exotic destination. Lucky for them I am an outdoors kind of girl and wanted to have my wedding day somewhere that was intimate, and close to nature.

A few years back, I went to Sugar Hollow Retreat for a church trip and it kept coming to mind when I was thinking of destinations for the wedding. I loved the mountains, I loved the area around Sugar Hollow and I finally decided to give them a call to see what could be arranged.

Jim and Marty were wonderful in all the help they were able to provide. We were able to set a date and set aside the entire retreat for our wedding party.

We wanted the wedding to be a casual affair and wanted to focus more on the ceremony and reunion of friends and family that we haven't seen as opposed to the glitz and glamour so many weddings focus on today.

We also rented the facility from a Thursday to Sunday with the ceremony planned for Saturday afternoon at sunset.

The weather was warm (end of May) and inviting, the attire casual. My bouquet was of wildflowers, and we had small candle lanterns and Christmas lights for the evening decorations. Again, nothing fancy, just festive.

We had a short ceremony that was performed by a close friend of the family who was an ordained minister, and members of my family who happen to be excellent bluegrass players provided the entertainment.

We kept to food simple - a pig pickin' with a lot of home-style side dishes that were brought by family members and stored in the great lodge. We thought a large cake was an extravagance we didn't need and instead splurged on gourmet cupcakes - which made the trip much easier than a cake would.

For me, it was the perfect wedding; low-stress and low-key. Getting to spend the extended weekend with family and friends in such a beautiful place like Sugar Hollow Retreat made the time together priceless.

This couldn't have been pulled off without the help of Jim and Marty. They were available to help with questions about logistics, questions about items that we should probably try to procure from home (instead of hoping to find them once we got there).

So, a great big thank you to Jim and Marty for helping to make my wedding day perfect. We loved being at Sugar Hollow and hope to make a trip back with our friends and family soon.

Margaux Ostenblat

Our Quirky Mountain Wedding

While my new wife and I respect tradition, the bride-in-white, dressy formal wedding at a church was not for us. We needed a wedding that was a little off-beat, unique. Something more our style. Having yawned our way through plenty of weddings in the past, our highest priorities were bringing the people we love together to witness our day, and making sure they had fun. Sugar Hollow Retreat is the only place I can imagine that really fit us.

Having both grown up in the farmland foothills of North Carolina and Virginia's mountain country, we have a healthy respect for the beauty of nature. Though our jobs have lead us country mice to settle in a more urban area these days, we still appreciate the surroundings of our childhood. Sugar Hollow, situated in the mountains of Northeastern Tennessee, offered the perfect backdrop for our outdoor ceremony, with the breathtaking view behind the Whitetail Stage in the full fiery glory of October's leaves.

Our relatives were thrilled by Sugar Hollow's wildlife as well. While not quite tame, the local wildlife know that the Retreat is a safe place to graze, forage, or just hang out, often only a few feet away from where we sat on the Retreat's porches. Having grown up in The Middle of Nowhere, NC, I felt like I was up to my neck in the local fauna all through my youth, so perhaps I was not quite as impressed as everyone else. In fact, it became a running joke among the entire group to point out every animal along the way to me after I commented, "Yes. It's a deer. I've seen them before." After that, every deer, raccoon, squirrel, turkey, bird, chipmunk, and every critter in between was gleefully identified for me. Even though they were doing it to get a rise out of me, they couldn't suppress the wonder in their voices.

More than one person commented to me that they didn't quite know what to expect when we drug them out to the far reaches of Tennessee for our wedding. They were all pleasantly surprised. I'm not sure if they expected to be in rickety shacks with outhouses or what, but everyone enjoyed the homey, yet modern comfort of the lodgings. A common comment was "Wow. This place is nice. I really didn't expect it to be this fancy." The innkeepers, Jim and Marty, are masters of their craft. Their help organizing the wedding and situating the guests was invaluable, and more appreciated than they can ever know on such a hectic weekend. 

Our ceremony was brief, as we had wanted it to be. There was fun to be had. From the Whitetail Stage, our guests retired to the Lodge for a full spread of North Carolina-style barbecue from Opie's, and a few kegs of choice beverages. Our sound system was set up on the upper deck of the Lodge, providing light music during the reception and ear-ringingly loud music to dance to later. As the night wore on into the early hours of the morning, the party separated itself into two groups. One group sat in rocking chairs around a bondfire a short distance away from the lodge, discussing this and that while pitchers of beer were relayed to them. The other group clustered outside of the Lodge and on the deck, dancing and singing as iPods were relayed to the special guest DJ (Me) with instructions to play this song or that. I will chuckle for years to come as I envision my father dancing his odd shuffling dance up there on the deck, or my new bride and sister dancing like crazed maniacs with hair flying. 

In short, the wedding was perfect. Perfect for us. And that's what's really important. Even the members of our family who may not have approved of my bride's choice of color for her wedding dress, or something left out of or added to the ceremony, or our choice of vows, or any number of other things thanked us for a great time. 

Steinkraus/Leblanc Wedding