Wedding DJ at Stokesay Castle & The Knight’s Pub in Reading, PA

The Space

George Baer Hiester built Stokesay Castle in 1931 as a honeymoon gift for his bride, Anne Hall Nicolls, modeling it on the actual Stokesay Castle in England that he had visited at age 13 in 1922. His cousin, architect Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg II, designed the replica using hand-cut stone, cathedral ceilings, and exposed wood beams matched to the original English castle, on a 10-acre property in Reading. The marriage itself did not last, Anne refused to live there and the couple divorced in October 1936, five years after the wedding, but the building she never fully occupied has outlived that story by nearly a century.

The Hiester family used the castle occasionally until 1956, after which it became a restaurant through the 1970s and operated until closing in 2007. Jack Gulati bought and restored the property starting in March 2009, putting millions into the castle, the ballroom, and the surrounding grounds, and later added The Knight’s Pub, designed by Muhlenberg Greene Architects, the successor firm to the castle’s original architect, roughly 80 years after the castle’s completion. Today the main castle, banquet hall, and pub together cover 32,000 square feet.

Capacity & Layout

The Royal Ballroom holds up to 400 seated guests, making this one of the larger reception rooms in our regular rotation, comfortably scaled for a full extended-family wedding with a live band or DJ and a real dance floor. For a smaller wedding, the Lord’s Dining Room seats up to 50, a genuinely different scale of room that suits a rehearsal dinner or an intimate ceremony dinner rather than a full-size reception.

Outdoor ceremonies happen in the Wedding Garden, on a manicured lawn set against the castle’s stone walls, with the option to move the ceremony indoors if the weather turns. A Princess Suite serves as the bridal suite, and a Board Room and Royal Terrace round out the property’s smaller spaces, giving a wedding party room to get ready, take portraits, and stage the day without competing for the same square footage as the guests.

Amenities

Full bar service runs through both the Lord’s Dining Room and The Knight’s Pub, so a couple has a working restaurant and pub operation on site rather than a single banquet bar assembled for the day. That matters for a rehearsal dinner or a next-day brunch as much as it does for the wedding itself, since the Pub functions as a real restaurant independent of any event booking.

The grounds themselves are part of the amenity package: 10 acres of lawn and woodland surround the main building, and the castle’s stonework and cathedral ceilings give a couple a genuinely distinctive photo backdrop that a purpose-built banquet hall cannot replicate. A wheelchair-accessible parking lot is provided, and the property’s dual identity as both a working restaurant and an event venue means the kitchen staff are used to serving beyond a single seated banquet.

Location & Getting There

Stokesay Castle sits on its 10-acre property in Reading, Pennsylvania, close enough to the city that guests are not making a long rural drive but far enough from downtown that the castle and its grounds feel genuinely set apart. Because the site also operates as a working restaurant, Stokesay Castle and The Knight’s Pub, guests unfamiliar with the venue can find it easily through its restaurant listing as well as its event booking.

The building’s stone construction and cathedral ceilings, the same features copied from the original 13th-century English castle, mean sound behaves differently indoors than it would in a drywall ballroom: hard stone surfaces carry and reflect sound more than a soft-finished room, so a DJ working the Royal Ballroom typically adjusts levels and speaker placement to account for that reverberation rather than running the same setup used in a carpeted hotel space.