Wedding DJ at The Machaven in Rocky Mount, NC

The Space

The Machaven was built in 1907-1908 for James Hines, known locally as the ice king of the state for the ice plants he ran along the railroad line between Rocky Mount and Salisbury. The house is a two and a half story Classical Revival brick mansion with a slate hipped roof, five interior chimneys, and a pedimented portico set on Doric columns, with a full-width one-story porch running along the front.

The Hines family lived in the house for four generations before it left the family and became The City Club under owner H.I. Tharrington, serving lunches and dinners to private members until about 2007. A bar, an elevator, and a prep kitchen with a walk-in refrigerator and ice machine were added in the late 1980s, and the house sat unused for roughly 15 years before reopening as an event venue.

Capacity & Layout

The house seats 100 people inside for dinner, a number that fits the scale of the rooms rather than a converted warehouse or ballroom. Ceremonies take place outside the front of the house, on a lawn reached through a wrought-iron gateway, and the reception moves under tents in the side yard, with cocktail hour held inside the house itself among the original parlor and drawing rooms.

Upstairs, the original bedrooms were converted into two rooms known as the Gentlemen’s Quarters and the Ladies Parlor, connected by archways and served by a separate set of servants’ stairs, which gives the wedding party its own path through the house that does not cross paths with catering staff working the main floor below.

Amenities

The Ice Baron Lounge, the house’s bar room, has a large wraparound bar and windows looking out over the lawn and the carriage house, a nod to Hines’s ice business worked into the room’s name. The Machaven does not cater in-house but welcomes outside licensed and insured caterers, and a prep kitchen with a walk-in refrigerator and ice machine, added in the late 1980s, gives them somewhere to actually work.

Parking covers 25 cars in a paved lot with another 15 to 20 spaces by the carriage house, plus free public parking about a block away for overflow. The house is fully handicapped accessible, with an elevator in the rear portion and handicapped bathroom stalls, so guests with mobility needs are not limited to the ground floor rooms.

Location & Getting There

The Machaven sits in downtown Rocky Mount’s Villa Place Historic District and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, a house James Hines named for his wife Mary Matilda McEntyre, blending her family name with the word haven. We have worked a wedding here and know the front lawn ceremony and the tented side yard reception firsthand.

Sound moves differently between the reception spaces. Under a tent in the side yard, a DJ is working an open-air setup with no walls to hold the sound in, while cocktail hour inside the house, with its plaster walls, high ceilings, and hardwood floors original to 1907, carries voices and music in the tighter, warmer way an older brick house naturally does.