Weddings 2022: Stunning Willowbrook Mill Wedding in Northport

After a proposal in the Upper Peninsula, Alison and Selena knew they wanted to get married Up North. Working with a dream design and planning team, their big day came to life at Willowbrook Mill in Northport. Dive in for all the details of their stunning Northern Michigan wedding.

This article was first featured in the 2022 issue of MyNorth Wedding.

Alison Kinning & Selena Creed | July 15, 2021

As a vascular surgeon at Michigan Vascular, Alison Kinning cares for humans. As a wildlife biologist, Selena Creed protects both birds and the flying public by keeping the runways clear at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. It didn’t take long for the bots at OkCupid to deduce that these two caring people might enjoy a first date. That quickly happened, but, ok cupid, it was pretty much a clunker of a first night on the town together: the pair met for a movie that turned out to be, as Alison describes it, “the worst movie ever.” To boot, Alison had just gotten back from a friend’s wedding in New York City and she was exhausted.

Still, there was enough chemistry between them that a week later Selena drove from her home in Ann Arbor to Alison’s home in Holly to walk Alison’s dog with her. (“My dog was difficult, he’s best introduced to someone new out on a walk,” Alison says.)

Fast forward a year to their engagement in September of 2020. The couple, who had driven to Copper Harbor in the Upper Peninsula to be engaged, envisioned a similarly beautiful setting for their wedding. And while they wanted a destination wedding, they didn’t want one that was too difficult for their mostly Michigan guests to get to.

So, Alison Googled LGBTQ-friendly wedding venues in Michigan and up popped Willowbrook Mill in Northport. Set in the picturesque harbor town at the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, Willowbrook Mill’s setting got a big check for natural beauty. It would also allow their guests to spend a long weekend exploring this spectacular corner of Northern Michigan—without getting on a plane.

As Alison and Selena discovered when they met with Willowbrook Mill Owner Mimi Heberlein the following October, it isn’t just Northport and the Leelanau Peninsula that are picture-perfect: so is Willowbrook Mill. Constructed in 1879, the rustically elegant white clapboard building set beside a small creek has served several purposes over the centuries, though, just as the Heberlein family thought when they purchased it in 2016, it is tailor-made for intimate weddings.

Willowbrook Mill works with a number of event planners including Conradie Event Design, owned by Melissa Conradie. Browsing Conradie’s site, Alison clicked on a story about a foraged dinner for friends that Conradie, along with the creative team known as NoMi Collectif, designed and executed for Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine (Read it here: Create a Foraged Feast with Morels in Northern Michigan). Struck by the team’s interpretation of a woodland theme in their table design, Selena and Alison were not only sold on NoMi Collectif, they were ready to trust them totally with their event: “We told Melissa from the get-go that we just want to show up and get married,” says Alison, adding, “neither of us is very good at this sort of thing, nor do we have the time.”