About
B
lack Sheep Shelter practices agricultural hospitality with a working organic farm adjacent to a wedding and event venue.
Nestled off a country road with views of fields and forest any which way you turn, the property offers a space of quietude and communion with nature and with the time honored tradition of growing crops and raising animals. More than a business, Black Sheep Shelter captures a way of life that its owners cherish and wish to share with others. A way of being that values humility and simplicity, and praises playfulness.
Black Sheep Shelter provides a rustic venue with modern and minimalist tones and connects its guests to a hyper local food experience and a zero waste business. We are farmers by trade, and keeping our hands in the dirt has been a priority from the outset of this endeavor. The venue rests adjacent to a two-acre farm which is framed by a trellis for hardy kiwi, grapes, and flowering vines that doubles as our deer fence. Unadorned and vintage, we have favored natural building materials and ancient environmental truths. Warmth runs through the patina and the time worn brick and wood.
As a wedding and event venue, Black Sheep Shelter offers a space unlike the typical barn wedding and different from a traditional outdoor wedding. The skeleton of an existing barn was renovated into a new creation-a uniquely open-sided shelter with an understory that welcomes the outdoors by structurally extending into a large cottage garden area. These dry bones are waking with new life, supporting native woodbine, clematis and hydrangea vines.
The romantic ruins have been left in place and a conversation has unfurled between the built environment and the less tame world of the flora and fauna. The Shelter evokes this sense of union in a variety of ways: by blending what is usually indoor space with outdoor space; through letting the stories that inhabit the old and the dilapidated stand amongst the young and aspiring; and in doing so we are invited to open our interiors to the exterior and to see the marriages which are begun in this space as echoes of a greater spiritual union between Creation and the Creator. For us it also captures a deep conviction that nature holds a beauty that we are not meant to deconstruct, but are rather invited to stand back and behold it with gratitude. Keeping with the horticultural theme, a modern glasshouse has been built to dance under the stars while enjoying a space with heating and air-conditioning.