When you drive down Ventura Boulevard, the sight of the Sportsmen’s Lodge is a bit jarring. Amid all the slick stores and restaurants that now flank Ventura Boulevard, seeing what looks like a log cabin in a jungle (for all of the flora on the property is pretty wild) after passing the swanky Sherman Oaks Galleria, then the slick strip malls with Coffee Bean is like saying, “which one doesn’t fit?
Photo by Flickr’s ftfesz71
I’ve done maybe a handful of weddings — 5 or 6, in all the time I worked with my mom — at the Sportsmen’s Lodge. I liked two things about the place — the spiraling staircase in the banquet center (and I cannot, for the life of me, find a picture of the staircase; I’d probably have to dig into my mom’s printed pictures for one) and the swan ponds. Other than that, it was not my favorite venue — it’s in a busy area, the parking lots are kind of hard to get to, the facilities were old, the ballrooms were dark and low-ceilinged. But it had its charm, and we worked with it.
