Ashridge House Wedding DJ & Entertainment

Ashridge House has been a priory, a royal residence, a wartime hospital, a finishing school and a business school across seven hundred years. It sits in 190 acres of gardens laid out by Humphry Repton, who called them his Garden of Gardens, with National Trust woodland beyond.

We’re on Ashridge’s own list of wedding suppliers, and we’ve done enough weddings here to know the building after dark.

The rooms

Ashridge has nine heritage rooms and takes between 90 and 180 guests. A day here moves through several of them.

The Main Hall carries a cantilevered stone staircase that winds round the room, which is why so many ceremonies happen here. Licensed for 180, as is the South Terrace outside.

The Lady Marian Alford Room was the drawing room. Rose serpentine marble columns, a gold-leaf ceiling, windows onto the South Lawn and the Italian Garden. Ceremonies up to 130, dining up to 100.

The Repton started life as a conservatory linking the house to the Chapel. It seats 170 for dinner and takes 280 for a Mandap or Chuppah.

The Wyatt is where the evening goes. Austrian oak panelling from 1863, a bar attached, and it’s the room Ashridge themselves point couples towards for music and dancing. Most of our weddings here end up in it.

Who brings what

Ashridge’s own wedding options include a wooden dance floor, so it’s worth checking what yours covers before adding anything.

Beyond that we supply directly: dance floors, staging, draping and uplighting. Uplighting is the one we’d point at first in the Wyatt, because oak panelling and gold leaf do something with colour that plain white light never gets near. It’s an addition to the DJ setup, quoted with the rest.

The bar and the music run to midnight as standard, and Ashridge can extend both to 1am for a fee. Worth settling early, because it changes how the last hour is built.

One thing that shapes the night here more than people expect: with 189 bedrooms on the estate, nobody is watching the clock for a taxi.

How we work

The day belongs to you, and everything we do follows from that.

You’ll get an online request system for your music, where tracks are marked must play, play if possible, or do not play. You can also build your own list with our playlist builder. There’s a planning sheet, and we speak to Ashridge the week before to cross-check timings against theirs.

On the night, a wedding DJ who reads the room and stays out of the way. No microphone chatter. Mark has been doing this for over forty years and judges at The Wedding Industry Awards.

Live entertainment

Our entertainment roster covers string quartets, harpists, saxophonists and singers for the daytime, live bands and gospel choirs for the evening, and magicians, caricaturists, dancers and circus performers when you want something your guests won’t have seen before.

Plenty of couples here put a band or a saxophonist alongside the decks across the night. That pairing is our DJ Live setup, and we can arrange both together.

Talk to us

Ashridge sits four miles from Berkhamsted, which is around half an hour from Euston by train, and 34 miles from central London by road.

Most couples come to us twelve to eighteen months out, though we can often help at shorter notice. Pricing is tailored to your day, so tell us your date and roughly what you have in mind.