St Charles Farms & Equestrian Center

Best Value for a Hunter Jumper barn in the area. Friendly and family atmosphere for everyone. Nice solid stalls, quality hay and grain. The owners are terrific! If you want the best care, and knowledgable certified trainers this is your place.

Did not have a good experience here. Brought my daughter for a lesson. When we walked in the office we were not acknowledged at all. I told the lady we were here for a lesson. Response was you can sit down and wait, she’s not here yet. Ok…
Sat there for 15 min. Lesson time was now 10 min past starting time. 5 min later trainer shows up. From what I hear this is the owners daughter. A one hour lesson lasted for 35 min. I paid for an hour so I asked the front desk lady and she said the hour is an estimate. Huh? Look, people can run late. It was the fact there was no apology, lesson 25 min short, felt like no one cared and poor attitude of staff. I am so so glad we did not settle. Ended up finding an awesome barn with great trainers.

BE AWARE!!! The trainer will sell lame horse to you and keep you riding the lame horse and showing. SHAME! Unfortunately, as a first horse owner I cheated and doing the wrong things under the instruction of such terrible trainers and owners here. FINALLY, I moved out of crap. Terrible place to board your horse and take lessons. It’s a nice facility though, but the poor management and unqualified trainers will only ruin this beautiful place. My friend rode here and the only thing I can heard from her is complains and struggling of moving to other places. They have several trainers here but none of them are good as many good trainer left. Head trainer/owner’s daughter takes more time on her phones and usually late for lessons. It states the lessons run for about an hour but she only showed up for 30 minutes. This trainer always cancel her lessons a few hours ahead of lesson times. Some events is not always open to all clients, but for their top /​long term students to attend, which is not a real family environment. The horses are not well taken care of, they are all skinny and even the vet claimed that those horses are too skinny to be ridden. They will charge for additional hays to feed the horse, even though horses are skinny is due to the poor quality of hay. Horses are turned out in the really muddy paddock and some even got lame because of that. In the summer, the water level are super lower, even empty. The stall are not cleaned and sometime, its all about poop and horse just sleep on their poops … The indoor and outdoor arena are hard and full of tiny rocks, which could easily hurt the horses. Their farrier are cheating clients’ money for granted without any apologies when found out. The other trainer are rude too, asking the boarders to move her horse so the trainer can get her horse to stay under the fans for cooling. Some of their young students are also rude too and things got stolen all the times. But some boarders are very nice and helpful. The boarding fee probably will be the lowest around the expensive Chicago area, but their other service fees are unbelievable high.

I LOVE sFc! All my barn friends are like a second family to me! Always a warm welcoming greeting coming into the office everyday! The grooms are AMAZING with the animals and love the horses just as much as the owners! While owning two horses that are boarded here its so comforting! Lesson times are very flexible 6 days a week! I would suggest everyone comes to tour sFc and schedule a lesson or pony ride!