Wedding DJ at Atalaya Castle in Murrells Inlet, SC

The Space

Atalaya was built between 1931 and 1933 as a winter home for philanthropist Archer Huntington and his wife, sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, who needed a milder climate during a decade when she was living with tuberculosis. Archer, a scholar of Moroccan culture, designed the entire 200-by-200-foot house himself, reportedly without ever drawing formal plans, working from Moorish and Mediterranean Revival models he had studied along Spain’s Andalusian coast. Local laborers built it during the Depression under contractor William Thompson, work Archer insisted on hiring locally to support the regional economy.

The house wraps three sides of a central courtyard around a 40-foot square watchtower that once held a 3,000-gallon water tank, and Atalaya, fittingly, means watchtower in Spanish. Twenty-five chimneys, each capped with a copper hood that turns with the wind, rise across the roofline, and hand-wrought iron grills that Anna Huntington herself designed still cover the windows, originally meant to guard against hurricane winds coming off the Atlantic just 150 yards away.

Capacity & Layout

Atalaya does not publish a fixed guest capacity, and couples planning a wedding here should work directly with Huntington Beach State Park on numbers for a specific date rather than assume a figure. What the layout does offer is the large central courtyard, ringed by the house’s 30 living-quarter rooms and shaded by palm trees and fig vines around the base of the old watchtower, as the natural gathering space for a ceremony or reception.

Event time runs a defined window, roughly 5 to 10pm with an option to purchase more, and setup on the day of the event runs 9am to 5pm with cleanup pushed to the following morning between 6:30am and 9am, so a couple plans around the park’s schedule rather than an open-ended rental. Water, electricity, and restrooms are available inside the house itself, which is not a given at a building this old.

Amenities

Outside vendors are welcome, so a couple is free to bring in their own caterer, florist, and other services rather than working from a required list, and parking is available within Huntington Beach State Park itself, alongside the beach the house has sat 150 yards from since it was built.

Atalaya has carried National Register of Historic Places status since 1984 and sits within a National Historic Landmark District as of 1992, and the park still runs the Atalaya Arts and Crafts Festival every late September, a tradition now well past 40 years running. Couples marrying here are booking a working historic site and state park rather than a private venue built solely for weddings, and admission fees apply to both the park and the house separately.

Location & Getting There

The house sits about 5.5 miles from Murrells Inlet and roughly 30 miles south of Myrtle Beach, inside Huntington Beach State Park, so guests are driving into a public park rather than a private estate, worth noting on invitations so no one is surprised by park admission at the gate.

Inside, the courtyard’s hard stuccoed masonry walls and open sky overhead carry sound outward rather than holding it in one room, and the house’s thick original walls, built for a coastal, hurricane-facing climate, mean any DJ setup benefits from working in the open courtyard itself, where the sound has room to spread, rather than trying to fill one of the smaller enclosed rooms along the perimeter.