Wedding DJ at The Lace House At Arsenal Hill in Columbia, SC

The Space

The Lace House was built in 1854 by Columbia banker John C. Caldwell as a wedding gift for his daughter Mary and her husband, Thomas J. Robertson, which makes it a house with weddings built into its history from the start. It takes its name from the intricate ironwork detailing on the building, a common mark of the more architecturally refined houses raised in Arsenal Hill before the Civil War, and that ironwork is still what visitors notice first walking up to the front of the house.

The three story house later served as headquarters for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union before the State of South Carolina acquired it in 1967 for hosting official guests of state. It now sits within the Governor’s Mansion Complex, in the historic Arsenal Hill neighborhood of downtown Columbia, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which means the exterior and grounds are kept to the same standard the state uses for its own official functions.

Capacity & Layout

The property holds up to 300 guests seated indoors, or as many as 600 for a standing outdoor event, a wide enough range that a couple can scale the same property from an intimate seated dinner to a large standing reception depending on the guest list. That indoor number is the one to build a seated floor plan around, and the gap between the two numbers is a useful guide for deciding whether a wedding should be seated throughout or open up to a standing reception after dinner.

Ceremonies are held in the outdoor gardens, with the reception able to move between the indoor rooms and the outdoor grounds afterward, so the day has a natural shift in setting between the two events rather than repeating the same room twice. At roughly 9,606 square feet, the house itself has enough interior space to host a full seated reception if weather calls for it, so an outdoor ceremony plan still has a real indoor fallback rather than a tent as the only backup.

Amenities

The manicured gardens are the property’s outdoor centerpiece, formal enough to photograph well without additional decor, and they sit inside a historic district that gives the grounds a settled, established look rather than a newly landscaped one. Mature trees and the surrounding nineteenth century architecture mean the backdrop for photos changes very little from season to season.

Because the house is part of the Governor’s Mansion Complex, it carries the upkeep and formality of a state property: the rooms and grounds are maintained to host official guests, the same standard a wedding at the site benefits from. That also means the property is used for official state functions in addition to private events, which is part of what keeps the house and gardens in the condition they are in.

Location & Getting There

The Lace House sits in downtown Columbia, inside the Arsenal Hill historic district alongside the Governor’s Mansion itself, a setting with mature trees and other nineteenth century houses around it rather than a commercial corridor. The location puts a wedding within a short drive of downtown Columbia’s hotels and restaurants for out-of-town guests.

We have worked a wedding on this property, and the split between the outdoor garden ceremony and the indoor reception rooms matters for sound: the gardens are open air and forgiving for a ceremony sound system, while the house’s more enclosed rooms hold music better for dancing, so a DJ typically sets up a lighter system outside for the ceremony and a full setup indoors for the reception, moving between the two rather than running one system across both settings.