Find Your Wedding Package | Scarborough House
There is a moment that happens to almost every couple who starts planning a wedding. You open a venue website, you find the pricing page, and your stomach drops a little. Not because of the numbers, but because of how much work the page is asking you to do. One long wall of text. Three or four packages stacked on top of each other. Fine print about guest counts and check-in times woven through paragraphs that all start to look the same. You scroll, you squint, and you try to figure out which part of this page is actually about your wedding.
We watched that happen for a long time here at Scarborough House, the private estate wedding venue we run in Stantonsburg, North Carolina, just outside the city of Wilson and about an hour east of Raleigh. Couples would come to a tour having already read our pricing, and almost every time the first thing they said was some version of the same sentence. They were not sure which package was theirs. They could not tell where one ended and the next began. And when they wanted to send a single link to a parent who was helping pay, or to a partner who was at work, they had to send the whole page and say, look at the middle part, the second box, the one with the Saturday in it.
That is a small problem on the surface. Underneath, it is not small at all. The pricing page is where excitement either grows or quietly leaks away. So we rebuilt it. This post is the story of what changed, why it matters for you as a bride or groom, and how it makes the very first step of planning a wedding feel less like homework and more like the beginning of something.
The real problem was not the price. It was the search.
When we sat down and listened to what couples were actually struggling with, the issue was almost never the cost itself. People understand that a wedding has a number attached to it. The issue was the search. You knew roughly what kind of wedding you wanted. Maybe a full weekend with everyone you love staying on the property. Maybe something small and quiet for thirty people. Maybe a weekday celebration because you are practical and you noticed the date math works in your favor. But our old page made you read everything to find the one thing that was yours.
Imagine walking into a bakery and being handed a single laminated sheet with every cake, every pie, every loaf of bread, every wedding tier, and every birthday option printed in one paragraph. You would find what you wanted eventually. But you would also feel a little tired by the time you did. We did not want the first feeling of planning your wedding to be tired. We wanted it to be the feeling you get when you find the thing and you just know.
So instead of one page that tried to be everything, we made a set of pages that each try to be one thing, clearly and completely. You can still see them all together on the main pricing page, where they sit side by side like options on a menu. But now each one also lives on its own, with its own web address, its own photos, and its own answer to the simple question every couple is really asking: is this the one for me.
The Weekend Wedding: three days instead of four hours
The heart of what we do has always been the weekend wedding, and now it has a page that finally does it justice. Most weddings last about four hours. Yours lasts three days. You arrive on Friday afternoon, you leave on Sunday morning, and in between the entire estate belongs to you and the people you love most.
That means the whole property. The historic main house, which is the oldest Federal-style home in Wilson County and a building with more than two hundred years of stories in its walls. The thirteen bedrooms that let your wedding party and your closest family sleep on site, so nobody is driving back to a hotel in Greenville or Raleigh at midnight. The heated and cooled pavilion. The pool, the fire pits, and the grounds that turn gold at the end of the day.
On its own page, the weekend wedding can finally breathe. We can show you what Friday actually feels like, how Saturday unfolds, and why Sunday morning coffee on the porch with your new spouse and your favorite people is the part nobody tells you to look forward to and everybody remembers. The price is right there at the top, plain and honest, with no markups hidden underneath it. And when you find a date you want, you are one click away from asking us to hold it.
The Micro Wedding: small on purpose, not by accident
Not every couple wants two hundred guests. Some of the most moving days we have ever hosted had thirty people in the room. That is what the micro wedding page is for, and giving it a home of its own matters more than you might think.
For a long time, couples who wanted something intimate felt like they were asking for the leftovers of a bigger wedding. They were not. A small wedding is a choice, and often a brave one, because it says the day is about the marriage and not the production. The micro wedding is built for up to thirty guests, and the part that surprises people most is that it is all inclusive in spirit. We line up the vendors through our trusted local partners. Photography, florals, the food, all of it handled. No vendor calls. No spreadsheets. No deciding on linen colors at eleven at night.
Putting this on its own page means a couple who only wants something small can find exactly that, send the link to the people who are coming, and never have to scroll past packages built for crowds three times their size. If you have ever felt like the wedding industry was nudging you toward bigger when your heart wanted closer, this page was made with you in mind. You can read more about how we think about guest counts and food on our wedding food calculator, which takes the guesswork out of feeding everyone.
The Weekday Wedding: for the practical romantics
Then there are the couples we quietly love the most, the practical romantics. They look at the calendar, they notice that a Tuesday in October has the same beautiful light as a Saturday, and they realize the smart move is right there in front of them. The weekday wedding is theirs.
A full estate wedding day, Sunday through Thursday, for up to two hundred twenty five guests. You bring your own officiant, caterer, photographer, and decorator, whoever you want, however you want it. We have the tables, the chairs, and the tablecloths ready. It is the most flexible way to have a big celebration on the grounds, and for couples coming from Durham, Wake Forest, and the wider Triangle, a weekday date often opens up vendors and savings that a peak Saturday simply cannot.
This package used to get lost at the bottom of the old page, which always felt unfair, because the people who choose it tend to be exactly the kind of grounded, clear-eyed couples who have the best weddings. Now it stands on its own and says, plainly, this is a real wedding and a smart one. We are glad you found it.
The All-Inclusive Wedding: the one where you plan nothing
Here is the brand new part, and the one we are most excited about. Some couples do not want options to compare. They want to hand the whole thing to someone they trust and show up to their own wedding rested. For them, we built the all-inclusive wedding, and it works a little differently from everything else on purpose.
With this one, we handle every vendor. Catering, florals, photography, the DJ, the coordination, all of it arranged by us around your vision. Because no two all-inclusive weddings are the same, there is no single fixed price printed on the page. Instead, we build one transparent number around your guest count, your season, and your wish list, with zero hidden vendor markups underneath it. You tell us what you dream about. We come back with a real, honest quote and then we carry the weight.
We were careful about how we built this page, because an inquiry should never feel like a trap. When you reach out about an all-inclusive wedding, you are not signing anything and you are not getting an instant pressure pitch. You are starting a conversation with the two people who own the place and will personally answer you. That is the whole promise of a private estate near Raleigh instead of a wedding factory. You get us, not a call center.
Beyond the wedding: a real front door for every other event
The last piece of this rebuild fixed a problem that had been quietly bothering us for years. Scarborough House has hosted far more than weddings. We have had concerts, milestone birthdays, family reunions, corporate dinners, and private retreats on these grounds. But the only way to ask about any of that used to be a single email link buried at the bottom of the pricing page. People sent those emails into what felt like a void, and we did not always have a clean way to track them.
So we built a proper custom event page with a simple form. If you want to host something at the estate that is not a wedding, you tell us the kind of event, a few details, and how to reach you. It creates a real inquiry on our end that we follow up on personally, usually within a day. No instant price, because a corporate retreat and a fiftieth birthday are not the same thing and should not pretend to be. Just a real human conversation about what the property can do for your day.
We will be honest about one thing, because we always are. There is one kind of event we cannot host, and that is a pool party. Our pool is reserved for overnight wedding guests, for insurance and privacy reasons, and that is a firm line. If you ask about one, the form will tell you kindly and right away rather than leaving you wondering. We would rather give you a clear no in two seconds than a slow maybe over two weeks. And we will still happily talk about any other event you can dream up on the grounds.
Why a clearer page is actually a kinder one
It would be easy to read all of this as a website update, a bit of housekeeping. It is more than that to us. Clarity is a form of respect. When a page is honest about what each option costs and exactly who it is for, it treats you like an adult who is making one of the biggest decisions of your life. When it hides things, makes you hunt, or forces you to read packages that were never meant for you, it wastes the one thing engaged couples never have enough of, which is time and calm.
We restored this two hundred year old estate with that same belief. The Federal-style symmetry of the house, the tall windows, the black shutters, the brick end chimneys, none of it is loud. It is clear. It knows what it is. We wanted the way you choose your wedding here to feel the same way, settled and unhurried, the way the front porch feels when the sun starts going down over the fields.
A house that has always welcomed travelers
If clearer pages feel like a small kindness, it helps to know they come from a place that has been practicing hospitality for two centuries. The main house at Scarborough House is roughly two hundred five years old, and in that time it has been a great many things. Local history holds that it served as a stagecoach stop, and later a church, a school, and even a roofing company before we found it. There is a long-told local legend that George Washington once stayed here, which is at least plausible for a real stagecoach home sitting on a well-traveled route through eastern North Carolina.
We mention all of this not to brag about old bricks, but because the house has spent its entire life doing one thing. It takes in people who are passing through an important moment and gives them a place to rest. A wedding is exactly that, an important moment that you are passing through together, and the building seems to understand the assignment. When we restored it starting in 2020, pouring close to a million pounds of concrete and buying out nearly every store of Sherwin-Williams white paint from Wilson down to Cary, we were not trying to make something new. We were trying to let an old, generous house keep doing what it was built for.
What staying on the property actually feels like
The single biggest difference between a weekend here and a wedding almost anywhere else is that nobody leaves at the end of the night. With thirteen bedrooms and ten bathrooms, your wedding party and your closest family wake up where the wedding is. There is no shuttle schedule, no block of hotel rooms forty minutes away in Raleigh, no goodbye that happens too early because someone has a long drive.
Instead there is a Friday night where the people you love most are all under the same roof, laughing in the kitchen, claiming bedrooms, walking the grounds in the dark. There is a Saturday that never feels rushed because the getting ready, the ceremony, the dinner, and the dancing all happen on one property. And there is a Sunday morning that belongs only to you, with coffee on the porch and the quiet that comes after the biggest day of your life. Couples tell us again and again that the Sunday morning is the part they did not know to expect and would not trade for anything. You can see more of the lodging and the spaces in our photo collection.
Every season has its own light
One question we get on almost every tour is when the property looks its best, and the honest answer is that it does not have an off season, only different kinds of beauty. Spring brings the green back to the fields. Summer evenings stretch long and golden, and on the hottest days we run the pavilion fans and dump the ice from our thousand pound ice machine straight into the pool to drop the temperature. Fall is the showstopper, with the kind of light photographers drive hours for. Winter is quiet and crisp and surprisingly romantic with the Edison bulbs glowing against a bare sky.
Because the light matters so much to your photos, we built a free golden hour calculator that tells you the exact moment the sun will set on your wedding date and works backward to help you time your portraits. It pairs nicely with our ceremony seating planner, another free tool that turns your guest count into a printable chair diagram in a couple of minutes. These are the kinds of small, practical gifts we like to leave lying around for couples, the same spirit behind splitting the pricing into pages that respect your time. If you want help finding the right people to capture it all, our vendor directory is full of trusted local talent.
How to use the new pages
If you are just starting out, here is the simplest way to find your footing. Open the main pricing page and read it like a menu. When one of the options makes you lean in, click through to its own page and sit with it. Look at the photos, read what is included, and picture your people in it. Then send that single link to your partner, your mom, your maid of honor, whoever is in this with you. One clean address, one clear package, no scrolling instructions attached.
When two of you have looked at the same page and felt the same pull, that is your sign. The next step is not a contract. It is a tour. Come walk the grounds, stand under the pavilion, see the bedrooms, and let us answer every question in person. You can read what other couples have said about their days here on our testimonials page, and see the real weddings in our gallery. If you want to understand the area first, our area guide covers everything around Wilson, Greenville, and the drive in from the Triangle.
We are a small family operation. Meika and I, along with our boys who lived on this property during the years we brought it back to life, have hosted more than fifty weddings here, and our goal is two hundred fifty. Every one of those days started the same way yours can, with a couple finding the page that felt like theirs and deciding to come see it for real. The pages are clearer now. The rest of it, the part that matters, is exactly the same as it has always been. It is the estate, the light, the people you love, and a place that was built to hold all of it.
Find the page that feels like yours, and when you are ready, come stand in it. We will be right here.