Piatt Castle Mac-A-Cheek is a historically significant limestone manor built between 1864 and 1871 by the Piatt family. It stands today as a privately owned museum, cultural center, and event facility, serving the region as a popular destination for tours, weddings, receptions, and other public- and private-sector gatherings. McCall Sharp Genet was hired to renovate the existing castle and design a new banquet hall along with an intermediate outdoor event area. The renovation included creating a bridal suite and expanding the existing restroom to meet ADA accessibility requirements.

The new banquet hall is designed in a Romantic French Barn architectural style featuring stucco walls, dark-trimmed expansive windows, wood trusses, decorative timber accents, and grouped chandeliers. The 9,371-square-foot indoor event space includes a 350-person banquet room with an integrated bar area, commercial kitchen, storage room, nursing room, and men’s and women’s restrooms.

The intermediate area between the new banquet hall and the historic castle encompasses 3,700 square feet (approximately the size of a tennis court) and can comfortably accommodate up to 300 guests in the lower terrace and additional seating available, and a fire pit, on the upper terrace.

Additionally, our involvement included:

Conducting a structural assessment of the existing castle and designing with historic preservation needs in mind.
Developing conceptual design options that balance contemporary event-space requirements, code compliance, accessibility upgrades, and preservation of the Castle’s historic elements.
Advising on event layout planning, including weddings, receptions, indoor/outdoor configurations, guest flow, and accessibility.
Preparing renderings, diagrams, and documentation to support the Castle’s staff and the Mac-A-Cheek Foundation in evaluating modernization, restoration, and expansion options.
Offering improvement strategies to address preservation priorities, building-code upgrades, infrastructure needs, and operational readiness while minimizing disruptions to museum functions and public tours.

This project reinforces our firm’s strengths in historic building evaluation, adaptive reuse for cultural and community purposes, and balancing preservation with modern programming needs.