Untraditional Wedding Venues
Fun, untraditional wedding venues
Looking for an untraditional wedding venue for your untraditional wedding? Maybe a museum, a music venue, a distillery? This list is for you! Doesn’t hurt to check out our other venue lists too though:
Raleigh wedding venues
Durham wedding venues
Chapel Hill wedding venues
All of the wedding venues included are welcoming to the LGBTQ+ community!!
And while you’re making a venue decision, make sure to check out the Kivus & Camera wedding guide:
North Carolina Museum of Art
NCMA is a dream wedding venue. The grounds are sprawling with awesome sculptures scattered through the fields and gardens. And then of course there are the interior galleries, which your guests can wander through during cocktail hour. What a treat! I love visiting, and I love it even more when I get to photograph a wedding there.
More information and real weddings at the Museum of Art
Marbles Kids Museum
Do you want a colorful wedding? If you’re on our website, there’s a chance you are looking for colorful photographs. Well, one good way to get colorful wedding photos is to book a venue filled with color, and Marbles Kids Museum dominates the color game. There are also tons of activities for you and your guests to enjoy. Come on, be a kid again.
Kayleigh & Nick’s Marbles wedding
The Museum of Life & Science
Butterflies, bears, and treehouses, oh my. Let’s continue with the theme of having lots of fun at your wedding and pretending to be a kid again. Remember going on field trips to your local museum? That’s what weddings at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham feel like. You can go on a dinosaur walk, slide down a slide, and get married by a butterfly garden.
Rachael & Andrea’s Museum of Life & Science wedding
NC Museum of Natural Sciences
Let’s continue on this museum kick, with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. You can have your first dance under the towering fossils of Acro, The Terror of the South; get portraits in front of one of the largest globes in the world, and listen to toasts in the NC forest.
Sarah & Adam’s Natural Science Museum wedding
Mystic Distillery
Mystic was NC’s first bourbon distillery since prohibition. And not only can you go for tastings and tours (and purchases), you can get married where they make the delicious stuff!
Liam & Abby’s Mystic Distillery wedding
Mystic Distillery website
Greensboro Science Center
Please, please, please hire us to photograph your Greensboro Science Center wedding! Pretty please! I love visiting the Greensboro Science Center (otters! dinosaurs! meerkats!) and getting to have a blast photographing a joyful wedding day while I’m there is truly the best. You can get married in a planetarium (really, an omnisphere, but still), with dinosaurs, in an aquarium, et cetera, et cetera. If any of those things sound fun to you, definitely check out their wedding options!
Courtney & Ben’s Greensboro Science Center wedding
Greensboro Science Center website
Duke Lemur Center
Lemurs are the freaking coolest! They’re really adorable too, so you should definitely have them at your wedding. That would be hard at a traditional wedding venue, but that’s why we’re promoting some awesome offbeat, untraditional wedding venues. The Duke Lemur Center is one of my favorites, because, well, LEMURS! First and foremost this is a sanctuary for these endangered animals, but you can have weddings there too 😀
Samantha & Cesar’s Duke Lemur Center wedding (and engagement session)
Sylvan Heights Bird Park
The Sylvan Heights Bird Park in Scotland Neck, NC is a gorgeous oasis home to thousands of birds, and it definitely makes for a unique, untraditional wedding venue. Your guests can enjoy bird encounters and learn about the different species while they walk around before and/or after your ceremony, and you can even walk into an enclosure where parakeets will come and land on you for some incredible portraits. If you like birds, then this is your wedding venue for sure.
Raj & Dana’s bird sanctuary wedding
Boxcar Barcade
Boxcar in Durham has an event space attached to their barcade (bar + arcade for those not in the know), so you can get married, eat, dance, AND play some skeeball!
Nicole & Nick’s Boxcar barcade wedding
Boxcar’s website
Whatever your heart desires
Have something specific in mind as an untraditional wedding venue? It doesn’t hurt to ask your dream location if they’d be open to hosting a wedding. The worst that can happen is they say no. Your wedding should represent the two of you as a couple, and if a book store ceremony followed by a picnic reception is the perfect fit, go for it.
Just make sure you get permission and don’t go over occupancy!
We believe that love is bright and colorful. And love is FUN.
Your wedding photographs should be fun, bright, and colorful too. Kivus & Camera are Raleigh wedding photographers who create unforgettable, breath-taking photographs. Your photos will stand out from the crowd. Your wedding story will be cemented by beautiful, artistic portraits AND enthusiastic, genuine moments. Want to know more? Click below. Can’t wait to hear from you!
