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Little Treehouse is wedding site
by Aaron Moselle

Ginny Robinson exchanges vows with Mark Messick in a wedding held at the Little Tree House Café. The Rev. Kent C. Matthies of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Germantown conducted the ceremony. (Photo by Pete Mazzaccaro)

When Ginny Robinson e-mailed the Little Treehouse Café to see if she and her fiancé Mark Messick could get married there, she wasn’t sure what kind of response she’d get.

 “I didn’t think we had a chance at all in having them say ‘OK,’” Robinson said.

To Robinson’s surprise, however, Rachael Williams, who owns the Gravers Lane restaurant and playhouse, didn’t think twice about the idea and quickly sent a reply accepting Robinson’s request.

“We were just thrilled,” Williams said. “We worked incredibly hard to make this place happen and the fact that someone loved it enough to get married in it, it was really touching for us. So it was a pretty easy decision.”

And so on Friday, just six weeks after the initial e-mail, Robinson and Mark Messick were joined as husband and wife beside a giant tree stencil in the children’s play area of the café.

The 45 wedding guests – including toddlers and adults – sat shoeless in a circle around the pair.  (Robinson, Messick and the minister also went shoeless – a house rule in the play area).

“It was very beautiful – it was very special,” said Williams, who said she doesn’t plan on doing any more weddings, but will soon hold other special events like sleepover birthday parties and activities geared toward older children.

Robinson, who moved to Roxborough from San Diego in July 2008, started bringing her daughter Ellie, now 11-months-old, to the Café before she could even crawl. 

It’s where Ellie – short for Elizabeth – started to learn how to walk and where Robinson said she started to make some of her first friends in the area.

For those reasons and more, Robinson said the Little Treehouse Café quickly became an important and meaningful place to her family.

She couldn’t think of a better place to be married.

Robinson’s friends fully agreed.

“All of my mom friends said, ‘If you have a wedding at the Little Treehouse it’ll be completely epic and legendary,’” Robinson said.

Legendary or not, Robinson said she has no regrets about choosing the Little Treehouse Cafe for her wedding.