Wedding DJ at Shakespere on the Hudson in Catskill, NY

The Space

Shakespere on the Hudson sits on nearly 100 acres of unobstructed river frontage on the Hudson, an estate built around two large homes rather than a single event hall. The River Lodge, styled after the Great Adirondack Camps, and the Hudson River Mansion together hold 21 bedrooms, and the two can be booked together for a full buyout or separately depending on the size of the wedding.

A 2,600-square-foot patio extends the dining room outdoors, and beyond that the property includes a glass-enclosed greenhouse and several smaller private spaces, so a couple has real options beyond the main dining floor for different parts of the day. The wine program itself is a fixture of the room: 60 wines are poured on a sustainable tap system, and each keg holds 26 bottles and lasts through roughly 1,500 bottles’ worth of pours over its refillable lifetime.

Capacity & Layout

With 21 bedrooms across the two homes, this is built as a weekend buyout rather than a single-day rental, which changes how a couple plans the event: guests are lodging on site through the wedding, not just attending it. One documented wedding here drew 150 guests through a tented ceremony, a seated dinner, and a pavilion reception, which gives a sense of the scale the grounds can handle.

The lawn is set up for a tent, which is where the ceremony and often the seated dinner happen, while the pavilion elsewhere on the property is used for the reception and dancing afterward. That split between tent and pavilion means a couple is planning two separate footprints rather than one single room, with the lawn handling the formal parts of the day and the pavilion carrying the party into the evening.

Amenities

The River Garden restaurant and B&B on site gives a couple a built-in catering and bar option without bringing one in from outside the property, and both homes’ private heated pools, hot tubs, and a fire pit give guests something to do across a multi-day stay rather than just the single day of the wedding itself. That combination of lodging, food, and outdoor space is part of what makes a river-frontage buyout like this different from a single rented hall.

Hiking trails and river access for kayaking round out the grounds, useful for a rehearsal-weekend crowd staying across the 21 bedrooms rather than arriving for just a single afternoon of guests. Because the two homes can be booked together or individually, a couple can scale the overnight footprint up or down to match how many people are actually staying over for the weekend.

Location & Getting There

The town of Hudson is about ten minutes away by Amtrak, which gives out-of-town guests a train option into the area rather than requiring everyone to drive the full way up the Hudson Valley to reach Catskill. The estate itself, on nearly 100 acres of river frontage, is the kind of property where the grounds and the water are as much a part of the day as any single room, since photos and downtime both happen outdoors.

For a DJ, the pavilion is the space built for reception and dancing, an open-sided covered structure that carries sound differently than the tent on the lawn does, so the reception’s music needs its own setup and levels separate from whatever amplification covers the ceremony and dinner under canvas.