Baby showers are the event most often held somewhere nobody would have chosen, because the guest list is small enough that a proper room feels extravagant. It is not, particularly on a weekday or a Sunday, and the difference in the photographs is considerable.
Practically, a shower needs four things and we have all of them: a table for food that is not the table people are sitting at, somewhere to put gifts that is not the floor, parking close enough that nobody carries a pram across a field, and a room warm enough in March. The fireplace is lit on request, which in a Stark County spring is not a decorative point.
How they usually run
Most run three to four hours from late morning or early afternoon. Guests arrive over the first half hour, eat, play whatever games have been decided on, open gifts, and leave before the baby's mother has had enough. Tables are set before you arrive, so the morning is not spent laying up.
Forty guests in a room that seats three hundred sounds wrong and is not. We lay a smaller event toward the hearth end so it reads as intimate rather than rattling around.