Penryn Grounds

We have a picturesque venue and we are featuring all the amazing spots you have access to on your wedding day.

Our Ceremony Spaces

Gazebo

The stunning Gazebo on the front lawn is another one of Penryn’s ceremony sites. It can act as more of a formal and traditional style while overlooking the properties prospering land with peaks of Lake Ontario showing through the trees. This site has full sun throughout the day. When it is not used as a ceremony site it is the perfect spot for lawn games and some of Penryn’s charming garden seating for guests.

Mansion

​The side of the mansion is also a gorgeous ceremony site for Penryn. It can also act as more of a formal and traditional site. This site has been used for traditional Hindu wedding ceremonies. It allows for full view of Penryn in the back showing off the architecture of the ballroom and its many windows, and the mansion itself. This site also has full sun throughout the day, and holds lawn games and guest seating when not used for ceremony.

Our Grounds

The bridal suite consists of a glam room, a dressing room, and a private bathroom.

​The breathtaking Veranda is our coordinator, Judy’s very favourite place on all of Penryn’s Estate. A veranda is a long balcony and speaks to its vastness and features. It overlooks the 18th hole of the Port Hope Golf and Country Club, as well as the flourishing grounds to Lake Ontario. It is quiet and a special spot for many first looks with parents and husbands to be. With a perfect shade mixed of tiffany blue and robins egg blue on the ceiling, the Edison style string lights and ceiling fans makes it the perfect spot early morning bridal toasts or to simply enjoy a cocktail and the view. It can become one with the mansion if French doors are opened from the ballroom and the drawing room. It has a bar as well that is opened if your wedding has more then 150 guests. When Penryn Mansion was lived in the Veranda was considered the front of the house, and the now front door with the laneway was considered the back door that carriages would pull up to. Now that no one lives here it is used differently, all being appreciated for its beauty.

Penryn park has always hosted weddings throughout its history, in the 2000’s it continued to be a popular spot and couples began renting tents to allow for outdoor dining for weddings up to 200 people. This encouraged the purchase of Penryn’s very own permanent tent in 2008 that has a built in floor, dance floor, and panels that open and close depending on the weather. It was the perfect addition to the Penryn estate allowing weddings to level up as the tent fits 50 to 200 people. It is 40 by 80 feet with clear span French window walls and gable sunburst ends.

The bar shed and patio was permanently built a few years later to create flow and efficiently for Bride, Groom and their guests to have throughout the day.
When having a wedding at Penryn using the tent, you gain access to the bar, and the bathroom trailer that is onsite.
The tent can also be an alternative ceremony site in case of rain.

The Extended History of Penryn Park

Penryn Park, a distinguished heritage property in Port Hope, Ontario, has a rich history and architectural significance that reflect the evolving tastes of the 19th century. Constructed in 1859 and expanded in 1861 by Colonel Arthur Trefusis Heneage Williams, Penryn Park exemplifies the Cottage Gothic style. The house features intricate bargeboard trim, closer to medieval patterns than typical Victorian lacework, and includes Gothic Revival elements such as hood moulds, a Chinese pagoda roof, and a tower at the entrance, all characteristic of the Picturesque movement of the mid-1800s. Adorned with finials and pendants, the house is clad in local red brick with Tuscan red woodwork, complemented by cast-iron risers on the front steps.

Colonel Williams, a prominent figure in Port Hope’s history, inherited the estate from his father, John Tucker Williams, the town’s first mayor. A notable military leader and politician, Colonel Williams served in both the Ontario legislature and the Canadian legislature. Penryn Park, designed by architect Edward Haycock who also designed the east and west block of the parliament buildings in Ottawa.

Penryn Park’s architectural and landscape design embodies Picturesque Eclecticism, blending Gothic Revival elements with naturalistic settings that defy classical symmetry in favor of irregularity and natural beauty. The estate’s location on 24 acres overlooking Lake Ontario provided an ideal canvas for a design philosophy rooted in the natural landscape. Influenced by English architect John Nash and American writer Andrew Jackson Downing, whose pattern books popularized the Picturesque ideals in North America, Penryn Park became one of the best examples of High Victorian Tudor Gothic Revival architecture in Ontario.

Following Colonel Williams’ passing in 1885, Penryn Park passed through few owners, including Henry H. King, an American lawyer from Pittsburgh who had extensive real estate and business holdings. He became aware of the Port Hope area as one of the many Americans who spent their summers in the area. Over the years, the estate has been repurposed as a private country club, restaurant, and golf course, preserving its historical integrity amid changing uses. Designated for its heritage importance, Penryn Park’s buildings, including the adjacent Penryn Homestead, reflect a careful integration of architecture and landscape, embodying the picturesque ideals of irregularity and natural harmony.
Despite encroachments by urban development, Penryn Park retains all of its original charm, with its old trees and sweeping lake vistas contributing to its designation as a cultural heritage landscape. It stands as a testament to Port Hope’s architectural legacy and the enduring appeal of Picturesque design, offering visitors a glimpse into 19th-century aesthetics and the integration of built environment with natural surroundings.

​Special details:
Stained and etched glass at the main entrance is original. The panels on the double doors bear the initials of Col. and Mrs. Williams. The William’s family crest and motto in Cornish (“with God everything – without God nothing”) is in the panel over the door. In other windows of the main floor can be found the few remaining pieces of the stained and etched glass.

Penryn is picturesque, what does that mean?
The ideas emerged in England in the mid-18th century, and were an attempt to explain why natural scenery that was neither classically beautiful nor sublime was still aesthetically pleasing. A landscape that was considered picturesque would not be symmetrical or well groomed, it would also not be awe-inspiring. Instead, it would be irregular, varied and intricate, perhaps with an uneven silhouette of trees against the sky, a windswept path, or waves dashing against rocks. A landscape that manifested these qualities would be interesting enough for an artist to paint, hence the term ‘picturesque. Proponents of the picturesque point of view believed that landscape design should be brought closer to nature in all its tangled diversity, and that the natural beauty of gnarled old trees, for example, with their ever-changing effects on light and shadow, or a textured slope should be preserved, not swept away. The Picturesque Movement very quickly broadened to include not only landscape design but how one viewed architecture within that landscape.
Gothic architecture – and the ‘big house’ at Penryn Park is designated as Gothic Revival – was considered by the theorys advocates to be the most appropriate style to use within a picturesque landscape. According to one proponent, the Gothic “turrets and pinnacles” silhouetted against the sky as well as the lack of symmetry in the openings created a “splendid picture of confusion and irregularity'” that fit in perfectly with the picturesque sensibility. English architect John Nash may have been one of the most successful in incorporating picturesque principles with Gothic architecture, and he designed many famous picturesque castles and country houses in England.