our venues: THE BROOKS AT WEAHERFORD
Spinning a Business Out of Fairytales
A San Antonio Couple Builds The
Wedding Venue Of Their Dreams In
Pretty Parker County
BY MEL W RHODES
B
y the time they found their place in the rolling hills
east of Weatherford, Steve and Tricia Heflin were
tired of looking. For a year and a half, the San Antonio
residents had searched for a North Texas home within 30
minutes’ drive of Keller and their daughter and grandchil-
dren. Finally, Tricia Heflin asked the realtor: “I just need
a tree and a hill. Can you get me that?”
The Heflins were not looking for just any piece of
property close to their daughter; it had to fit in with
their business plans as well. To fit the bill, it had to be
lovely land, land on which they could build their “Last
Tango in Paris” dream — a wedding and event venue.
They planned to leave their successful architect/builder
endeavor in The Alamo City for a new start in more
pastoral surroundings.
Heflin said her husband sent her up to scout out the
21-acre farm off Azle Highway, located four miles north
of the Malt Shop on Fort Worth Highway. As she and
her daughter drove to the site, the tree-covered hillsides
she saw gave her hope. Even though the property was 40
minutes from Keller instead of 30, could this be the one?
The Heflins moved into the 120-year-old farmhouse
on the land in January 2014. They broke ground on their
project in March and held their first wedding at The
86
Steve and Tricia Heflin
Brooks at Weatherford on Oct. 25, 2014.
“We are loving it here,” Tricia Heflin said recently. “It
was hard to leave a place after 28 years, but we’re loving
it.” The couple spent 18 years in San Antonio and 10 in
New Braunfels. “It’s cool to have a dream and a design
on paper and then watch it come to fruition,” she added.
The chapel and 7,000-plus sq. ft. event venue at The
Brooks are lovely examples of rustic elegance. The rustic-
ity is achieved largely through very special appointments.
“The gates to the chapel courtyard and the flower cart
in the front entry, and then all the doors in the venue are
antique doors, and they’re from all over, but they came
from one shop in Santa Fe that my husband had known
about,” Heflin explained. “We took a trip out to Santa
Fe that January that we moved here. We left here with a
16-foot trailer and picked out all the doors for the venues,
and grates and different artifacts and the gates, and
brought them back. And, of course, my husband designed
them into the buildings. We watched it come into real-
ity.”
The chapel is a beauty, with its stained-glass windows,
rustic gables, teak wood doors and 18-foot steeple. Inside
are antique church pews, rustic timber trusses and chan-
deliers, and arched picture and stained-glass windows
that frame the bucolic beauty of a tree-covered hillside.
“Our favorite thing about The Brooks is our chapel,”
Heflin said. “I think that’s the biggest draw here — people
just love that chapel. Over and over I hear people say,
‘Wow! The pictures [of the chapel online] are great, but
they just don’t do it justice.’ And I love that. Because, you
know how you’ll look at pictures and they’re doctored