Loren Gold
Executive Vice President, Greater Raleigh CVB
What are three great off-site cultural venues for groups meeting in Raleigh and Durham?
- Nature Research Center at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (www.naturalsciences.org) in Raleigh is an innovative 80,000-square-foot wing of the museum that opened in April. The inspiring facility’s signature three-story multimedia globe, named the Daily Planet, is a unique venue for off-site meetings and events. Groups can utilize the space inside the Daily Planet or Environmental Conference Center with an attached outdoor terrace. Or groups may rent out the entire museum after-hours and enjoy exhibits, a dramatic two-story waterfall, a variety of live animals, whale skeletons and dinosaurs. Up to 1,550 people can be accommodated at museum events.
- The Cotton Room (www.thecottonroomdurham.com) in the Golden Belt Arts Complex is one of several venues in the area that reflects Durham’s industrial past, with spaces that have been adapted for corporate and other event use today. As part of the first LEED gold-certified historic campus in the Southeast, The Cotton Room is a former textile factory built in 1900 that once made cotton packaging for tobacco products. Its arched brick ceilings, hardwood floors and great natural window light characterize the downtown Durham location, and it can accommodate up to 400 guests in its 11,000 square feet of space.
- Sarah P. Duke Gardens (www.hr.duke.edu/dukegardens) is a celebrated site for both its beauty and quality, with a location in proximity to both Duke University campus and the rest of Durham. The Doris Duke Center inside the gardens is an ideal facility for various types of indoor and outdoor functions for up to 200 guests. The gardens were created in the 1930s by Ellen Shipman, a pioneer in American landscape design, and consist of original terraces, a garden of plants native to the Southeastern U.S., an arboretum devoted to East Asian plants, as well as pathways throughout the gardens.