Wedding DJ at
Nanina's in the Park

Forty-six feet
of dance floor

Nanina's Grand Ballroom has a forty-six foot white granite dance floor. That is a genuinely large floor, and it changes the job in a way most couples never think about until the night.

A floor that size does not fill from the middle. It fills from wherever the sound and the light are strongest, and if those are pointed at only one end you get a crowd at one end and an awkward empty expanse at the other — which reads, in photographs, as a half-empty party.

So we cover the whole floor rather than the front of it. That means several sources placed to give the far corners the same energy as the front, and lighting that treats the floor as one shape instead of lighting a stage at one end of it.

Granite is also hard and reflective. It gives the room its shine and it gives sound nothing to absorb, so level discipline matters more here than in a carpeted room.

A cathedral ceiling
and what it does

The ballroom rises to a cathedral ceiling hung with Austrian crystal chandeliers, with clerestory windows above. It is the reason the room photographs the way it does, and it is the reason ordinary uplighting disappoints here.

Uplighting is specified by throw — how far a beam travels before it runs out of intensity. Fixtures chosen for a ten-foot wall die a third of the way up a wall like this one and leave a bright band at the bottom with darkness above. The fixtures have to be picked for the room's real height.

The height helps sound as much as it complicates light. Volume has somewhere to go, so the room takes energy without becoming punishing — provided speech still gets its own treatment, because a tall reflective room is where toasts turn to mush first.

One wedding
in the building

Nanina's runs one event at a time. After the venues that run three rooms at once, that is a real luxury, and it changes what we can do.

There is no shared wall to protect, so the low end can sit where it should rather than being held back to keep the peace next door. Load-in is not negotiated around another vendor's schedule. And the ceremony — indoor chapel or the outdoor garden — runs without a second party's cocktail hour bleeding through a wall.

The winding marble staircase and Juliet balcony are the other thing worth planning around. An entrance down a staircase is one of the strongest moments a room can offer, and it needs the music cued to the walk rather than the walk fitted to whatever is playing.

Nearby venues
we work

Also considering somewhere else? These are rooms we work regularly.