The Rickhouse
Location: 609 Foster Street, Durham, NC 27701
Capacity: Up to 375 guests
Type: Urban / Industrial Historic
Website: rickhousedurham.com
In a city that has made an art form of reclaiming its industrial past, The Rickhouse is one of Durham’s most powerful examples of what happens when history and celebration meet inside the same walls. This was once RJ Reynolds’ Prizery, a tobacco warehouse where the leaf that built this city was sorted, graded, and stored in the particular silence of a building designed for commerce at scale. The walls are still here. The brick is still exposed. The wood has been restored and reclaimed with the reverence of people who understood that the beauty of a tobacco warehouse is not something you add, it is something you uncover, carefully, the way you uncover anything that has been waiting more than a century to be seen again. And now this building holds weddings, and the weddings it holds carry the weight and the warmth of a space whose history is written in every beam, every brick, and every square foot of the floor that once bore the weight of North Carolina’s most famous crop.
Foster Street places The Rickhouse in the heart of downtown Durham: walking distance from the restaurants and bars that have made this city a culinary destination, footsteps from the Durham Athletic Park where the Bulls played before the movies made them famous, and squarely within the creative energy of a downtown that has become one of the most exciting in the American South. A wedding at The Rickhouse is a wedding in Durham, and Durham is a very good place to begin a marriage.
The Grand Room
The Grand Room is The Rickhouse’s signature space, a room whose proportions can comfortably seat three hundred and seventy-five guests beneath the exposed brick and reclaimed wood that give the space its industrial character and its organic warmth. The restored timber of the ceiling and the walls carries the tonal depth of wood that has been aging for more than a century, and the brick provides the kind of textured backdrop that makes every floral arrangement, every candle, every glass of champagne glow with the warmth that only natural materials can produce.
Professional audio and video systems ensure that the acoustics of the celebration match the aesthetics: the toasts heard clearly, the music filling the room without overwhelming it, and the technology invisible behind the historic surfaces. Tables and seating for up to two hundred are included with the rental, and an eight-by-eight magnetic chalkboard provides a canvas for welcome messages, seating charts, or any personal touch the couple wants to add to the room’s vocabulary.
The Balcony
The spacious partially covered balcony is The Rickhouse’s hidden treasure: an outdoor space that overlooks the famed Durham Athletic Park with a view that carries the particular magic of a city whose baseball history, industrial heritage, and creative present are all visible from a single vantage point. Cocktail hours on the balcony give guests the Durham skyline and the evening air, and the transition from the outdoor warmth of the balcony to the indoor warmth of the Grand Room gives the evening a natural rhythm that single-space venues cannot replicate.
For couples who love Durham, who chose this city and want their wedding to reflect that choice, the balcony view is a love letter to the place. The Athletic Park below, the downtown skyline beyond, the particular quality of Durham light at the golden hour, these are not generic backdrops but specific, meaningful views of a city that the couple can point to and say, that is where we started.
The Dressing Suite
A beautiful dressing suite gives the wedding party a private space for preparation, the kind of room where the morning unfolds at its own pace, where the mirror and the light are right, and where the anticipation builds in privacy before the doors open and the ceremony begins. The suite carries the same design language as the rest of The Rickhouse, the industrial warmth, the attention to materials, the sense that every element has been considered for feeling as well as function.
From a Florist’s Perspective
The Rickhouse’s exposed brick, reclaimed wood, and industrial proportions call for floral work that engages the vertical space and the textured surfaces without competing with the architecture, arrangements that add organic softness to the industrial bones, that bring color and life to the warm monochrome of brick and timber, and that feel as if the tobacco warehouse opened its doors and the garden walked in. The warm tones of the brick and wood reward palettes in ivory, champagne, burgundy, dusty rose, sage, warm peach, terracotta, and soft gold, colors that glow against the industrial surfaces and catch the light with the particular warmth that natural materials amplify.
Tall centerpieces in elegant vessels are essential to engage the Grand Room’s generous ceiling height without being dwarfed by the proportions. Greenery installations along the beams or cascading from the ceremony backdrop connect the florals to the architecture. Garden roses, dahlias, ranunculus, peonies, protea, lisianthus, and generous eucalyptus, olive branches, and trailing greenery suit the space. The Rickhouse is a venue where the flowers should feel as if Durham’s industrial past and its romantic present met in the same room and agreed on what beauty looks like: bold enough for a warehouse, tender enough for a wedding, and honest in the way that only things placed with real intention in a building with real history can be.
Practical Details
The Rickhouse is located at 609 Foster Street in downtown Durham, North Carolina. Former RJ Reynolds Prizery with restored and reclaimed wood and exposed brick throughout. The Grand Room seating up to three hundred seventy-five guests. Spacious partially covered balcony overlooking the Durham Athletic Park. Professional audio and video. Beautiful dressing suite. Eight-by-eight magnetic chalkboard. Tables and seating for up to two hundred included. Walking distance to downtown Durham restaurants, bars, and attractions. Contact the events team at (919) 264-1038, email info@rickhousedurham.com, or visit rickhousedurham.com for availability, packages, and pricing.
Hidden Door Floral Studio designs wedding florals for venues across the Triangle. To discuss your wedding at The Rickhouse, schedule a consultation.