“We bought and renovated our wedding venue”

Planning a wedding is stressful. Buying and remodeling your own wedding venue in another country in two months? The ultimate relationship test. Find out how designer Daria Kulachek and her fiancé, David Ferrer Arroyo, somehow made it down the aisle.

Q: What possessed you to buy and renovate your own wedding venue? “I’m based in Los Angeles, and my husband is Spanish. We’d frequently visit Spain and talk about buying a second home big enough for both our families. One night while scouting Idealista, Spain’s equivalent of Zillow, I saw this 1920 stone manor house in Santiago: five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a garden, and a pool. We were also looking for a wedding venue. We thought, ‘What if we just bought one?’ We never saw it in person before buying; we sent local family members and an architect to assess it on our behalf. They reported back: extraordinary bones, needs a lot of love. The asking price was €390,000, around $450,000, which we negotiated to €370,000. My fiancé and I arrived two months before the wedding.”

Q: What did it take to get the space wedding-ready? “When I walked in for the first time, my heart sank. The house was virtually unlivable. We had to restore the heating and water before we could move in and had to wear hazmat suits to scrape the ceiling. Renovations cost around €15,000 [about $17k]. The week before the wedding, both families flew in, and we finished it together. There were nights I thought we wouldn’t make it in time, but people were kind to us in ways I didn’t expect while we were under the highest possible pressure. We had 55 guests, and it was the most beautiful day of my life! We named the house Pazo Palmera. I wanted our wedding to ‘bless’ the house so it holds this positive energy. We now use the house as a vacation home for our family and friends, and we’re making it ready for weddings or short-term stays when we’re not there.”

Q: How does running an event venue differ from a residential property? “With a rental, you’re optimizing for one tenant. With an event venue, you’re optimizing for a crowd. Coordinating caterers, florists, lighting crews, and sound engineers is no joke. Your systems (electricity, water, waste), surfaces (artificial and green), and garden need to be able to absorb that kind of use. We figured this out the hard way; we had to have extra restrooms installed on-site and bring in generators for outdoor lighting and sound systems.”

Q: What advice would you give investors on opening an event venue? “Find a good local event planner before you buy—not after. They’ll tell you immediately whether a property works as a venue—the access for catering vans, power supply, flow from ceremony to reception—and how much you can realistically charge and whether there’s demand. One thing we didn’t expect but turned out to matter a lot: Our garden is large and heavily planted, and the trees absorb sound in a way that an open terrace or courtyard can’t. It means music and sound won’t carry the way they would on a more open property.”