After a Fire Destroyed Their Highlands Wedding Venue, This North Carolina Couple Pulled Off a Spectacular Pivot
Four days before Tori Bilas and Tom Walsh’s planned nuptials, a massive blaze engulfed the Pavilion at the Farm at Old Edwards. A coolheaded planner and a mountain golf course saved the day.
“Humor is hugely important in my family. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you can’t really survive around us, especially my dad, who can make a joke about almost anything,” says Tori Bilas, the daughter of ESPN college basketball analyst and Duke basketball alum Jay Bilas. In August, Bilas married fiancé Tom Walsh (a Tar Heel, naturally) in Highlands, North Carolina—and that baked-in ability to find humor amid life’s joys, sorrows, and stressors was put to the test when her wedding venue burned to the ground just four days before she was set to walk down the aisle.
At ten o’clock the Monday evening prior, the Highlands Fire Department responded to a massive structure fire at the Pavillion at the Farm at Old Edwards, Tori and Tom’s reception venue, one they’d chosen months before for its “fairytale-like feeling” and lush, mountain setting. Highlands firefighters alongside teams from six additional fire departments worked through the night to wrestle the blaze under control. Mercifully, no one was injured, but the Pavillion structure was a complete loss.
Tori and Tom’s planner, Alexandra Bailey of Atlanta’s Proper Planning Co., was the first of the wedding party to get the news. “I put my phone down, closed my eyes, and, knowing what was about to transpire, took a deep breath, but honestly I didn’t panic,” Bailey says. Her unflappable poise and can-do demeanor had sealed the deal for Tori at their first meeting more than a year earlier. “I got a great vibe from Alexandra,” Tori recalls. “I knew she’d make sure things were very calm and collected. She wasn’t going to panic anyone no matter what happened.” Admittedly, scheduling delays and summer rainstorms (Highlands sits in a temperate rainforest) were the imagined hiccups—not the total loss of the venue—but confirming Tori’s instincts, Bailey barely flinched. She just picked up her phone and got to work, fast.
“I wanted to have clarity and answers before I made the difficult phone call to the Bilases,” Bailey says. And by mid-morning Tuesday, Bailey, her vendors, and the team at Old Edwards had the bones of new plan in place, shifting Saturday’s ceremony and reception to the nearby Old Edwards Club, which could not only accommodate Tori and Tom’s 194 guests for a seated dinner but also had many of the same aesthetic elements, including warm wood tones, stone fireplaces, and large windows that can be thrown open to the landscape beyond. With a working solution taking shape, she called Tori’s mother, Wendy Bilas, first. It was Wendy who drove out to the barn, where Tori, a lifelong equestrian, spent most mornings, to break the news. “She kind of told me one sentence at a time,” Tori says. “Once I realized everyone was okay and our wedding wasn’t canceled, I relaxed a little. We had a plan. It wasn’t perfect yet, but the wedding was still going forward.” By the end of the day, the trademark Bilas humor had surfaced, with Tori and Tom deciding to change their reception walk-in song to We Didn’t Start the Fire. “We just had to continue with the happiest weekend of our lives and treat it as such—no matter what,” Tori says.
One of planner Alexandra Bailey’s most impressive feats? Transforming the Old Edwards Club’s driving range into a dreamy ceremony location.
Critically, relocating to the Old Edwards Club allowed the Bilases to keep the ceremony and reception at one location as previously planned, which meant existing transportation logistics could remain in place. The biggest hurdle was finding a ceremony location that could deliver a similar experience and vision. Ultimately an exception was made owing to the compressed four-day timeline, and the club allowed the Bilases to use the driving range for the ceremony. “It’s this gorgeous mountain setting,” Tori says. “And Tom’s a big golfer. He actually played the course the weekend we got engaged, so he was thrilled.” Sleep was lost over the weather, but when the wedding day dawned, it was to a brilliant, blue-bird Blue Ridge sky.
For the reception, the staging and floor plan had to be completely reimagined, but Bailey was able to preserve the original dinner menu and seating chart, which was paramount to Tori, who’s a fine artist and stationer professionally and spent the better part of a year pouring her creative energy into the wedding’s gorgeous paper suite—menus, place cards, bar signage, and the like. “I was joking the week before that I was nearly as excited to show people what I’d created as I was to get married,” Tori says.
Extra linens had to be procured, a handful of bar tables were rearranged, and Bailey rush-ordered drapes to hide the club’s gym during cocktail hour, but miraculously, most of the original design elements translated beautifully, including the bulk of the romantic, English garden–inspired florals created by Floressence—loose, wildflower-like arrangements of allium and delphinium in a palette of muted blues, purples, and greens. The meadow-style ground arrangements meant to define a dance floor at the Farm were the only unique design element that had to be sacrificed, but even those were repurposed along the new stage front. “I feel like the guest experience was completely uncompromised,” says Bailey, who by Saturday evening wept tears of joy, relief, and awe at the hard pivot they’d pulled off.
For Tori, the day’s best moments were familial ones—her brother acting as officiant, a quiet post-ceremony moment alone on the golf course with Tom, her dad’s speech, which brought down the house, and her parents, who now share an anniversary with their daughter, dancing to their first-dance song thirty-four years later. “I was reflecting on the weekend with another [Farm at Old Edwards] bride, and obviously I would never say I’m glad this happened, but at the same time, I wouldn’t change a thing about the day. It was just a perfect, perfect day.”
Elizabeth Hutchison Hicklin is a Garden & Gun contributing editor and a full-time freelance writer covering hospitality and travel, arts and culture, and design. An obsessive reader and a wannabe baker, she recently left Nashville to return home to Charleston, South Carolina, where she lives with her husband, their twins, and an irrepressible golden retriever.