Wedding DJ at The Bascom in Highlands, NC

The Space

A visual arts center might seem like an odd choice for a wedding, until you learn what its main building is actually made of. The frame is an actual 1838 barn, 49 feet by 97 feet, that once stood in Linglestown, Pennsylvania, and served as a stagecoach stop until the 1920s. In 2007 its heavy oak timbers were disassembled, hauled to Highlands, and reassembled on site by contractor Wayne Yonce, so what looks like a gallery is structurally a historic barn.

The siding covering that frame is more than a century old itself, gathered from barns across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia, and the atrium floor is laid in old-growth white pine salvaged from historic barns, some of it originally threshing floor where wheat was struck by hand. Guests enter across an 87-foot covered bridge, the Will Henry Stevens Bridge, built in the early 1800s in New Hampshire and rebuilt here in 2009 using traditional trunnel joinery.

Capacity & Layout

Events happen on the covered terrace, which seats up to 200 guests and can hold more than that standing with additional tenting, a range wide enough to cover most wedding sizes without needing a second location. The terrace itself is a genuinely flexible space: temporary canvas walls with windows can be lowered in bad weather, so a ceremony or reception booked here isn’t fully at the mercy of the forecast the way an open lawn would be.

Ceremonies can also be set on the outdoor amphitheater along the Horst Winkler Nature and Sculpture Trail, which runs past a brook and waterfall through the property’s six acres, giving couples a genuinely different backdrop from the terrace if they want the ceremony and reception to feel like two distinct settings rather than one space repurposed twice over the course of the day.

Amenities

A catering kitchen is available on the main level for whichever caterer a couple brings in, which keeps food service close to the terrace rather than staged from a distant service area. The building itself totals 27,500 square feet across the main level, with restrooms and gathering space built in, and the adjoining Dave Drake Studio Barn, a former horse stable where guests once rode for a dollar fifty, now houses the pottery and three-dimensional arts program.

Because the property is first and foremost a working arts campus, the surroundings are unlike a typical event venue: exhibition galleries, a gift shop, and studio spaces sit alongside the terrace, so a wedding here happens inside a place built around art rather than around events. Events on the covered terrace run Monday through Sunday from 6 in the evening to 10 at night, giving couples a defined but generous window for an evening celebration.

Location & Getting There

The Bascom sits on six acres of a former horse farm, the old Crane Horse Farm, on a mountain plateau close to downtown Highlands, so guests staying in town have an easy trip out to a setting that still reads as rural despite the short distance. The grounds include meadows, forest, and streams in addition to the sculpture trail, giving the property real depth beyond the terrace and main building.

Given the building’s origins, sound in the main space behaves the way you would expect from an actual barn frame: the covered terrace, bounded by its canvas walls, keeps a DJ setup and dance floor contained without an open lawn’s dispersal, while a ceremony staged instead at the outdoor amphitheater along the sculpture trail sits far enough from the terrace that music and speeches there carry cleanly on their own.