The Forge Boulder City Wedding Photos

The Forge, or Forge Social House to use its full name, is a wedding and event venue at 553 California Avenue in Boulder City, about 26 miles southeast of the Las Vegas Strip. It is a small stone and steel building with a wood pergola over the front walk, golden barrel cactus and prickly pear planted across the gravel out front, and a courtyard behind it that the main hall opens onto through glass pocket doors. The venue’s own site says the building started life as Boulder City’s first post office and that the current owners took it over in 2014.

I’m McKenzie. I’ve photographed weddings in Las Vegas every year since 2010, more than 300 of them. Every photo on this page comes from one wedding at The Forge, and the whole set is here rather than a few favorites. It runs from the groom buttoning his jacket, out to a ceremony on a park lawn under an enormous shade tree, through the historic district on foot, and back to the cactus garden at the venue as the sky went pink.

If Boulder City is where you’re headed, send me a message and tell me what date you’re holding. I would love to hear about it.

What a Boulder City wedding looks like through a camera

The thing that makes this town photograph well is that it does not look like Las Vegas at all. No casino towers, no neon, no resort corridor. Boulder City was built for the people who built Hoover Dam, and the older streets still look it: low storefronts, wide sidewalks, mature trees that actually cast shade. In the black and white frame of this couple walking down the middle of the street, the street is empty. That is not timing on my part. It is just what a weekday afternoon looks like there.

At the venue itself, the front of the building is the picture. The stone wall carries the street numbers in big metal figures, the pergola throws a striped shadow across the walk, and the cactus garden gives you a foreground nobody else in the valley has. The carved Forge Social House sign sits low among the barrel cactus, which means you can put your couple beside it without the photo turning into an advertisement for the venue. Those frames were all shot at dusk, when the sky behind the roofline went soft and the entry lights came up.

A few streets over is the Boulder Dam Hotel, a white two story Dutch Colonial building finished in 1933 and on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982. Its columned entrance and its patio are in a good handful of these photos. It is a public building on a public street, so it is not something you book, it is somewhere you walk past on your way between things. That is the whole argument for getting ready and married in this town: everything worth photographing is within a few blocks of everything else.

The ceremony on this page was not at the venue. It was outside on a park lawn, under a tree wide enough to shade every guest, with a length of white fabric hung through the branches for a backdrop. Late afternoon sun came through the leaves in patches, which is exactly the light I want for an outdoor ceremony in the desert. Nobody was squinting and nobody had a hard shadow across half their face.

What it takes to photograph a wedding at The Forge

The drive, and what to tell your guests

Boulder City is about 26 miles from the Strip, so 30 to 40 minutes of driving for anyone staying out there. It is an easy drive and mostly highway. What catches people out is the other end of it. Boulder City is one of only two places in Nevada where gambling is illegal, a rule that goes back to the federal government building the town for the dam workers, so there is no casino resort to put a room block in. Lodging in town is smaller hotels and inns, including the Boulder Dam Hotel itself. Say all of that on your invitation. Guests flying into Las Vegas will otherwise assume the usual and figure it out too late.

One building, and a town you can walk

The venue is small. Up to 148 guests is what it publishes, and that is the right scale for what this building is. From my side, small is easy: the entrance, the courtyard and the hall are all a few steps apart, and I am not losing twenty minutes crossing a resort property to get one photo. The bigger advantage is outside the door. On this wedding we walked from the venue to the park, to the hotel, and back, all on foot in wedding clothes. Try that at almost any other Las Vegas venue or location I shoot at and you are getting in a car.

Ask about the ceremony before you plan around it

This is the one thing to sort out early. The venue describes a main hall opening to a courtyard through glass pocket doors, so there is outdoor space here. But the ceremony in these photos happened somewhere else entirely, on a public park lawn, and I do not have a Forge courtyard ceremony in what I shot. If the courtyard ceremony is the picture in your head, ask to see it set up with chairs in it on your tour, and ask what the guest count is for that layout specifically rather than for the room.

If you’re comparing this to other small venues with real character to them, The Doyle is the downtown Las Vegas version of the same idea, and Nelson Ghost Town is the other direction to go if what you actually want is old desert Nevada in the background. For guests coming from the valley, Green Valley Ranch in Henderson is roughly the halfway point between the Strip and Boulder City.

The best time of day for photos in Boulder City

The last ninety minutes before sunset, and it is not close. This town sits out in the open with nothing tall in it, so the sun does not disappear behind a building the way it does on the Strip. It goes long and low down the streets instead, and every frame on this page shot in that window has that light in it. The sidewalk photo where the bride is laughing is the whole case for it.

That window moves a lot across the year, and it is the number to build your timeline around. In November it lands somewhere near 4pm. In June it holds until close to 8, which usually means your best light shows up well after dinner has started. Send me your date and I will work backwards from the sunset time instead of guessing at it in the moment.

One more thing about the venue specifically. Its best frames are at dusk, not at noon. The entry lights, the pergola shadow and the sky behind that roofline all need the sun to be nearly down. If photos of the two of you in front of the building matter to you, we should put fifteen minutes aside for it after sunset rather than trying to catch it on the way in.

If The Forge is on your list, or you are still deciding between Boulder City and somewhere closer in, I would love to talk it through. You can see more of my Las Vegas wedding photography or just reach out and tell me about your day. No pressure and no sales pitch, just a conversation about what you are planning.