Burlington couple expands event, planning offerings with new venue in familiar place

The historic church-turned-event center at 1204 Washington St. in Burlington is operating under new management and a new name.

Megan and Logan Brincks purchased the 151-year-old building formerly known as Regal On The Hill last month, effectively adding the Cornerstone Wedding & Event Center to their expanding portfolio of businesses that include Black Tie Transportation, a limo service; It's Electric Entertainment, whose services include deejaying, lighting and event planning; and WTFlufff, an artisan cotton candy company.

"It got on the market and we saw it and we really weren't interested at the time in buying a wedding venue," Megan Brincks recalled recently after a day spent working on the building. "It's always been something that we thought one day we would, but there's a lot of wedding venues in (and around) Burlington."

One day after the Brinckses looked at the property, someone else made an offer on it and another offer was close behind, so they threw caution to the wind and put in a bid.

The building had been on the market for only about two weeks by the time their offer was in place, according to Andy Crowner, the Brinckses real estate agent.

What they had been searching for instead were potential properties to park the two limos they purchased earlier this year for their Black Tie Transportation business, but the couple found themselves taken by the building's history, along with its possibilities.

"I'm a big history nerd, so the historical part of it, I was like this is really cool to be a part of that history," Megan said.

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St. Patrick's Church first opened its doors in 1871. At its peak, it served as the place of worship for 800 parishioners. In 1998, St. Patrick's merged with St. Mary's to form one parish with two places of worship.

In 2002, Masses were suspended there due to construction work on Washington Street. The church closed permanently later that year and was slated for demolition until the Heritage Trust intervened. The nonprofit renamed the building Hibernia Hall and operated it as an event center until 2018, when it was purchased by Charles Myhre and Steve Stoll, who renamed it Regal On The Hill and remodeled the building's interior while keeping in line with the covenants the church placed on the building before selling it to Heritage Trust.

"When Heritage Trust bought it, the church basically gave them all these rules about, you can't do all of these things or else we will just demolish the building," Megan said. "You can't make it into another church, couldn't hold any religious ceremonies on the property, which is still in place. So when weddings happen here, they have to be nontraditional."

Other covenants include that neither the hand-painted designs on the woodwork nor the angels on the building's ceiling be painted over, that its stained-glass windows not be replaced or altered except for in the case of repairs, that it not be used as a store, and that it never be licensed to sell alcohol.

They also had been told that it couldn't be used after midnight, Megan said, but after tracking down the original covenant documents by going to the Diocese of Davenport, they learned this was not the case.

Being Catholics themselves, the Brinckses took no issues with the covenants, except one, and it largely has to do with liability.

"It currently operates as a BYOB venue," Megan said. "It was previously that you could bring your own alcohol, but you weren't even required to have liquor liability insurance. ... It's like a $50 add-on policy for the day for your homeowners insurance. Ideally, that's what you would do if it was a BYOB venue, but none of their previous contracts of said anything like that, so right now, it's a huge grey area of who's responsible if something goes wrong. Because the renters don't have that insurance, we don't have the liquor license or insurance, and so it opens a lot of people up to a lot of not good things."

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The Brinckses made their case to the church, and the church agreed to drop that clause of the covenant, allowing them to apply for a liquor license. They anticipate Cornerstone will be able to offer venue-provided alcohol selections by 2023, adding to a long list of customization options.

Plans for Cornerstone Wedding & Event Center: Performance venue with speakeasy atmosphere

The smell of cleaning products lingered in the air of what used to be the church sacristy in the basement of the building, where Megan had spent much of the day scrubbing the walls and doors of the room that will become a bridal suite.

Through that room is a large area, its would-be open-floor space obstructed by furnace pipes, that they plan to remodel into a live performance venue with a speakeasy atmosphere.

"Burlington has a really interesting art scene," Megan said. "Some of our staff are in their own bands, but there's nowhere that an unknown can just play. So we want to turn the basement into kind of a cool lounge space that we could do an open mic night or poetry slam, or if you have a band and you just want some experience performing for people, you can do this in kind of a cool, intimate, dark and cozy space. We want it to be a space where there's no pressure to be good, but if you're wanting a space to express yourself and to share your talents and to learn and grow and be accepted by people, that's the space we want to make."

During weddings, that space will be available as a dressing room for the groom's party.

The couple also plan landscaping to make the lawn better suited for outdoor weddings and events.

"It's our hope to be able to create outdoor ceremony space so people can get married under the big maple tree," Megan said, adding that it's getting to be too late in the season for outdoor ceremonies.

"But the 'in' thing is to have heavy blankets for your outdoor wedding guests. That's a big trend right now," Logan noted.

The couple keeps an eye on shifting wedding trends, and they're keeping them in mind when rethinking the indoor space and the decor options they will offer to guests.

"We want to do a modern take on historic charm, so really accenting the stained glasses, brick architecture, but also bringing in a very fresh, very crisp environment," Logan said, adding he envisions black and white to create heavy contrasts to create a dramatic setting.

Megan described the upcoming look as modern vintage or grand millennial.

"It being the way it is, there's a lot going on," she said of the space. "You have the stained-glass windows, you have patterns on the ceiling, you have these giant chandeliers, you have metallic paint, you have wood. But I think there's a way you can utilize all of that and make it really classy."

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While the two have a base style in mind for the main hall, plenty of customization options will remain available to guests.

"We want to create a space that people want," Megan said. "Is it going to be for everybody? No, and that's OK. There are 12 other amazing venues in town that one will be right for."

'There are no rules anymore': Client requests inspire unique experiences and new business ideas

Wedding packages offered through Cornerstone in collaboration with the Brinckses other businesses will range from do-it-yourself to "we do everything and provide a limo," Logan said. "We can bring in all the planning, all the coordination, all the decorating, all the transportation for a three-day event."

Day rates are available from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., while wedding packages range from two to three days.

"One of the cool things since COVID happened, it has thrown all the rules for weddings and events out the window," said Megan, who helped several Burlington area couples with their weddings after the pandemic upended their plans. "We're seeing more people not follow traditions. We're seeing more people care more about the actual experience and the guest experience for weddings and less about the formalities. And that's how our DJ company operates, too. Let's make your wedding the experience of a lifetime for everyone, not just for you and each other, which is important, but we want your guests to walk out of there and say that was unlike any wedding that I've ever been to in the best way possible.

"And that's what we tell our clients. There's no rules. You do what you want to do."

They've helped their clients arrange for everything from having a hand-rolled cigar bar to custom wine tasting to bumper cars at a carnival-themed wedding, an event that helped give rise to WTFlufff, which Megan launched in June.

"It was a Tuesday and Megan texted me and said I want to start a cotton candy business," Logan said. "By the next Tuesday, we had our machines, and by the next Tuesday we had all the sugar, and by the next Tuesday we were spinning our own cotton candy."

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In August, WTFlufff was hired to spin 600 cones of bacon-flavored cotton candy for the Luke Bryant Farm Tour in Boone. Other flavors include chai tea latte, mango habanero, cake batter, root beer and marshmallow.

It wasn't the first time one of the Brinckses' existing businesses inspired a new one.

It was discussions with It's Electric Entertainment clients that revealed a need for a limo service, and it was while working with her husband on their DJ business that Megan decided to become a certified wedding planner in 2019.

Logan, who grew up in the northeast Iowa town of Ossian, started deejaying while in high school and got a job with a company that averaged about 100 weddings a year between him and five other deejays.

He went solo when he moved to study software engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, which is where he met Megan, who was studying environmental restoration.

Megan began helping him with events on weekends, and the two continued to operate the business when they moved to Dubuque, where Logan worked as a software engineer for Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky, and Megan managed a tanning salon. Megan had worked in environmental education for a nonprofit in Minnesota.

"I have essentially a botany degree," she said. "Technically, I should be working for the conservation department. I was trained in school how to take land that has been polluted, degraded, overtaken by invasive species, all that stuff, and restore it to what it normally is. But those jobs are very few and far between."

Logan, now an interim engineering manager, was recruited to work as a software engineer at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, which is what brought the couple to Burlington.

They brought the DJ business with them. It's Electric now has three deejays, including Logan, two assistants and an office manager.

"It's been a very fast expansion," Logan said.

Finding community

When the couple first moved to Burlington, they considered it a stopping point on the way to a bigger city.

"Then we just fell in love with the community," Megan said. "We met a lot of awesome people. We live in an amazing neighborhood, and people have just been extremely welcoming to us and our businesses and our ideas."

They made many friends through Young Professionals, two of whom ended up being in their wedding, and found other friends in the vendors they worked with.

They enjoy hearing about the memories people have that are tied to the places they operate their businesses, such as the time a pet monkey broke into Cornerstone when it was still a church. One of Logan's colleagues remembers going to 712 North St., which now serves as the home base for It's Electric Entertainment, when it was still a grocery store.

"Someday, hopefully 40 years from now, somebody will say, 'that's where I met my deejay'," Logan said.

Michaele Niehaus covers business, development, environment and agriculture for The Hawk Eye. She can be reached at mniehaus@thehawkeye.com.

This article originally appeared on The Hawk Eye: Burlington couple opens Cornerstone Wedding and Event Center