Top 10 Wedding Venues in the Bay Area!

As a wedding planner who travels the world, our heart is here in California! With Anela Events, we have designed and planned a wide range of events from Northern California and Southern California. As your Bay Area wedding planner, here are some venues we have stepped foot on and planned.

Whether you are searching for a grand historic ballroom in the heart of San Francisco. A romantic winery estate with vineyard views or an intimate garden setting in the East Bay hills. Or even a magical going into Santa Cruz for a Forrest fairytale.

Here are 10 venues we have stepped foot on in Northern California!

1. Casa Real at Ruby Hill Winery

Nestled in Pleasanton’s Livermore Valley, Casa Real is one of the most consistently elegant and beautiful venues in Bay Area. Casa real’s highlights a spanish estate, surrounded by olive trees and vineyard feel.

Casa Real is one of those venues that feels like you’ve been transported. Spanish-style architecture, a sweeping vineyard view, soft string lights and warm stone — it has this beautifully romantic energy the moment you step in. We love this venue for couples who want a Wine Country feel without driving all the way to Napa. The Bay Area location makes it so easy on your guests, but the photos look like you flew everyone to Tuscany!

As a full wedding planner and designer who works at Casa Real regularly, we know every corner of this property and every opportunity it offers!

Photo Below: Taken by JKapture

2. The Palace Hotel

The Palace Hotel San Francisco is one of the great historic luxury hotels of San Francisco. The Garden Court is, without question, one of the most iconic wedding venues in all of Northern California. As a wedding planner and designer serving the Bay Area, we consider the opportunity to plan a wedding at The Palace a genuine privilege, one that never loses its sense of occasion, its weight. No matter how many times we have had the honor of standing inside it on a wedding day. This venue speaks for itself and needs minimal decorations, as the interior of this space is already so beautiful!

Beyond the Garden Court, The Palace offers everything a couple could want for a complete wedding weekend. Couples who want the ultimate San Francisco luxury wedding, formal, grand, architecturally magnificent, and imbued with the soul and history of one of the world’s great cities. The Palace is ideal for black-tie and formal aesthetics, for larger celebrations, and for any couple whose vision includes the phrase “once in a lifetime”!

Photo Below: Taken by Rene Zadori

3. Villa Montalvo

If you want a garden feel and a beautiful architecture, Villa Montalvo is one of the South Bay’s most enchanting and genuinely unexpected wedding venues, and one that is a gorgeous venue for couple who are aiming for a garden and elegant feel.

Villa Montalvo’s grounds are extraordinary in their diversity and beauty. Formal Italian-style gardens with sculpted yew hedges and its stone classical fountains, and statuary are framed by towering coast redwoods and coastal live oaks. At the end of the garden is the love temple, a small, ornate, and deeply romantic stone pavilion, is one of the most sought-after ceremony settings in the entire Bay Area. The villa’s Mediterranean facade provides a ceremony and portrait backdrop unlike anything else available in the region, and every season brings its own particular gift: the riot of spring bloom, the golden warmth of autumn foliage, the atmospheric mystery of winter mist among the redwoods.

With our featured couple, Anela Events assisted with designing their ceremony at the garden, cocktail hour in the Spanish courtyard, and ending the night in front of the Villa!

Photo Below: Taken by Asha Bailey Photography

5. The Palm Event Center

Driving into The Palm Event Center leads into palm trees leading into their space. This venue that gets out of your way and lets your design shine. Vineyard views, soft natural light pouring through the ceremony space, and a setup that flows beautifully from ceremony to cocktails to dinner without anyone having to break the spell. We’ve planned a lot of weddings here, and what we always come back to is how relaxed our couples feel — the venue, just, so you can focus on the people you love.

Photo Below: Taken by Heart Felt Media

6. The Hibernia

The history here is what makes this venue special. There are very few buildings in San Francisco, or anywhere in the world that carry the architectural magnificence of The Hibernia. Originally constructed in 1892 as a grand Beaux-Arts bank just steps from City Hall, this extraordinary landmark has been carefully transformed into one of San Francisco’s most sought-after and genuinely breathtaking event spaces. The moment guests step through the entrance, the main banking hall stops them in their tracks. We were taken away by the viintage ceilings, intricate narchitectural detail, marble floors that reflect the chandelier light,and the many rooms the building offers.

When working across Bay Area wedding venues, The Hibernia is one of the most thrilling and rewarding design canvases we encounter. The building’s architectural bones are so extraordinary that our work is not about filling the space with decoration. This venue is about creating a visual conversation with the existing magnificence. This space is already so lovely, that adding florals and drapes gives a personal touch and textiles that bring intimacy into the space. Receptions at The Hibernia have a quality of enchantment that guests genuinely cannot stop talking about. By evening, with the chandeliers illuminating the marble and the candles casting their warm glow.

Photo Below: Chanmi Photo

7. Casa Bella

Nestled in the quiet, sun-warmed beauty of the Sunol Valley, a hidden and unhurried gem tucked between the oak-covered East Bay hills and the open grassland preserve of the Ohlone Regional Wilderness, Casa Bella in Sunol is one of the most intimate and genuinely romantic Bay Area wedding venues we have had the privilege of planning at. This privately owned Italian-inspired estate, set against the rolling golden hills of the Tri-Valley, feels like a world entirely and wonderfully apart from the broader Bay Area. It offers couples and their guests a quality of seclusion, natural beauty, and personal warmth that no larger commercial venue can replicate or manufacture.

The property’s carefully landscaped courtyard spaces, lush gardens, and lovingly maintained grounds create a setting where every photograph tells the story of genuine, golden California beauty. A wedding at Casa Bella feels like the most beautiful private dinner party you have ever attended: every guest feels genuinely close to the couple and to one another, every detail feels personal, and the overall atmosphere is one of warmth, intimacy, and quiet magic.

With Casa Bella, they typically hold guests under 150 guests. This venue is genuinely private, deeply personal, and entirely their own. Casa Bella in Sunol is one of our most cherished venues precisely because of the quality of the couples it attracts: thoughtful, design-conscious, and looking for something that cannot be found in a hotel ballroom or a commercial event facility.

Photo Below: Taken By Adam’s Point of View

8. The Grand Island Mansion

The owner of Anela Events, Angelica, planned her sister’s wedding here! She had first hand experience at the Grand Island Mansion. If you’ve been looking for a venue that feels like the setting of a love story your grandkids will hear about one day, this is it. A historic mansion tucked along the Sacramento Delta, with grand staircases, ornate ballrooms, and a wraparound veranda that’s made for golden-hour first looks. We adore this one for couples who want something truly cinematic — a wedding that feels timeless and a little bit fairy-tale 

The overnight estate experience

One of the truly special and irreplaceable aspects of Grand Island Mansion is the ability to reserve the entire property, including all of its many bedrooms, suites, and historic common rooms — exclusively for your wedding party. Guests who stay overnight experience the mansion as it was always meant to be experienced: waking in historic rooms filled with morning Delta light, walking the formal gardens in the quiet of early morning, gathering around the grand table for breakfast in the formal dining room. No other Bay Area-adjacent venue offers this level of immersive private estate experience, and it creates a wedding weekend that becomes, for everyone who shares it, one of the memories of a lifetime.

Photo Below: Taken by Parvak Photography

9. Kohl Mansion

The mansion’s Elizabethan stone exterior, mullioned windows, and formal architectural proportions give it the unmistakable quality of an English country house that has found its way, improbably and beautifully, to the hills above San Francisco Bay. The formal grounds include manicured rose gardens that bloom in waves across the spring and early summer, broad ceremonial lawns framed by towering heritage trees, and garden paths and hidden garden rooms that invite wandering and create portrait session conditions of genuine and consistent beauty. With the light of the stone architecture and the garden creates wedding photography that couples genuinely treasure for decades.

Kohl Mansion is one of our most beloved venues as a full wedding planner and designer in Northern California because of the extraordinary creative freedom it offers. The estate works with exceptional versatility across a wide range of aesthetics with the stone architecture provides a warm and beautifully textured backdrop that photographs magnificently without overpowering, and allows the design elements we bring, florals, linens, lighting, stationery, personal details. Some of the most beautiful and personally meaningful wedding design work we have ever created has happened at Kohl Mansion, and we would be deeply and genuinely honored to bring that same level of care, creativity, and dedication to your wedding day here.

Photo Below: Taken by Ger Shoots Weddings

10. Nestle Down

Nestle Down in Nevada City is one of Northern California’s most magical, most unexpected, and most deeply memorable wedding venues. This venue is so special and we had a first hand tour of each part of the Forrest and what makes it unique. The owner of this venue has created a fairy-tale setting of towering ponderosa pines, sun-dappled wildflower meadows, hand-crafted and lovingly built structures, and the deep meaning for each part of the space. This venue is for couples who dream of a fairytale wedding. As a full wedding planner and designer who works across a wide and varied range of Northern California venues, we say without hesitation that Nestle Down consistently produces some of the most enchanting, most emotional, and most deeply resonant weddings we have ever had the privilege of being part of.

Inside the Forrest is a very intimate and natural landscape, arriving at Nestle Down feels like the world itself exhaling, like something tightly held releasing. The venue’s ceremony and reception spaces are not positioned near the forest: they are nestled within it, surrounded and sheltered by the trees in a way that creates a sense of genuine natural enclosure that is rare and precious. The dappled, ever-shifting light that filters through the pine canopy throughout the day creates photography conditions of extraordinary and entirely distinctive beauty, the kind of light that professional photographers travel for and that couples see in their wedding images and simply cannot believe is real.

Photo Below: Taken by Allan Famor Photo

Real weddings you see by Anela Events

Anela Events has had the absolute privilege in planning at these venue spaces, and seeing our couple’s wedding vision com true. With every venue we step foot on, our goal is to bring personal experience at every venue on this list, alongside the trusted vendor relationships and refined creative partnerships. We know them from the inside out: at every hour and in every light, across every season and every weather, and through the eyes and hearts of the couples whose most important and most beautiful moments we have been privileged to hold.

If a venue on this list is speaking to you, we would love to hear from you. We would love to hear your story, understand your vision, and bring everything we know and love about these extraordinary places to the creation of a wedding that is genuinely, completely, and beautifully yours.

Reach out to Anela Events to begin your Northern California or Bay Area wedding planning journey and start turning your wedding vision—whether in Napa Valley San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Livermore, to Sacramento —into an experience you and your guests will remember for the rest of your lives.