Wedding DJ at Marbles Kids Museum in Raleigh, NC

The Space

Marbles opened on September 29, 2007, the result of a merger between two Raleigh institutions, Exploris and Playspace, and more than 10,000 people came through the doors on opening day alone. The museum’s signature feature is impossible to miss: a two-story stainless steel wall grid holding over 1.2 million marbles that light up at night, a piece that gives the building its name and doubles as a backdrop for photos in the atrium.

The museum occupies more than 36,000 square feet of play-based exhibit space across two floors in downtown Raleigh’s Moore Square district, a location that puts it a short walk from the rest of downtown rather than out on its own. Exploris, one of the two museums that became Marbles, opened in 1999 as a $39.5 million interactive learning center, and that scale is still visible in how much room the building has to work with today.

Capacity & Layout

Exhibits are organized by theme across the two floors: Around Town for community role-play, Splash with its 65-foot water table and pirate ship, imagiFAB for building and making, EcoSphere on renewable energy, and Power2Play for active movement and sports. For an event, that layout means guests naturally spread across distinct zones rather than pooling in one open hall, which changes how sound, seating, and a dance floor need to be planned in advance.

The Wachovia IMAX Theater seats 271 to 272 people and has the largest conventional IMAX screen in North Carolina at 52 by 70 feet, a resource for any event that wants a large-format presentation built in rather than rented separately. Outside, the Marbles Playway is an open-air courtyard with shade structures and native plants, giving an event a genuine outdoor option attached to the same building instead of a separate offsite location.

Amenities

Bean Sprouts Cafe operates on-site for food, and while outside food is not permitted in the exhibit halls themselves, picnicking is allowed in the Playway courtyard, worth knowing if a couple wants to bring in outside catering for part of an event. The PlayStore gift shop sits near the entrance for guests who want to take something home, and the museum is wheelchair accessible throughout its exhibit floors.

Parking runs through the city-owned Wilmington Street Deck nearby, with two hours free on weekdays and free parking on weekends until 5pm, plus free street parking on weekends, details that matter for a guest list arriving downtown rather than to a venue with its own lot. The museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and admission normally runs on timed entry tickets, though a private event changes how the building is accessed for the night.

Location & Getting There

We worked an event in this space, so we know it from the inside: a downtown Raleigh building organized more like a series of connected rooms than one continuous hall, with the atrium and its marble wall as the space guests see first. Being inside the Moore Square Historic District puts the museum within easy reach of the rest of downtown Raleigh for anyone staying nearby or making a night of it afterward.

In 2025, Marbles ranked sixth nationally in USA Today’s 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards for children’s museums, recognition that reflects the same design, open exhibit floors built for excited kids, that a DJ has to work around at night. Sound carries easily across the tall two-story atrium and its marble wall, so a setup here favors the more contained rooms, like the IMAX theater or a single themed exhibit zone, over trying to fill the whole open floor with one system.