When Gavin and Sarah Mackie opened Larchfield Estate to weddings in 2007, Northern Ireland had never seen a venue like it. Twenty years and around 1,500 weddings later, the 425-acre Georgian estate near Lisburn, just under 30 minutes from Belfast, is a wedding and events venue, an overnight accommodation destination and a model for how a historic house can earn its keep.
In 2007, if you wanted to get married in Northern Ireland, you got married in a hotel. That was simply how it worked. So when a young couple started telling people they planned to host weddings in a stone barn on a family estate outside Lisburn, the reaction was mostly polite bemusement.
“People thought we were mad,” says Gavin Mackie, who co-owns Larchfield Estate with his wife Sarah. “There was no template for an exclusive-use venue here, and the whole house needed rewiring before we could even think about guests.”
“We had a beautiful place, a lot of energy and absolutely no idea how hard it was going to be,” Sarah adds. “Looking back, that was probably an advantage.”
Twenty years on, Larchfield has hosted around 1,500 weddings and is widely credited as the first non-hotel wedding venue in Northern Ireland. Most of its bookings still come through word of mouth, and 99% of couples say they would recommend Larchfield Estate.
Larchfield Estate at a glance
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From family farm to wedding venue
Larchfield has been in the Mackie family since 1968, when Gavin’s father, Leslie, bought it at auction. For decades it was a working farm. When Gavin and Sarah married there in 2007 and moved back to take it on, they sold their home in England to fund the work needed to bring the estate back to life.
They came to it with very different skills. Gavin, an engineer who had been selling dredging equipment, brought a builder’s instinct and a practical eye for what the old buildings could become. Sarah came from a career in media sales, where she was named on a Media 30 Under 30 list, and brought the commercial and marketing drive to fill them. Between them they restored the stone barn and stables, the cobbled courtyard, the sunken walled garden and The Old Piggery, and added the orangery, turning working estate buildings into spaces people would travel for.
Their commitment to the place is as personal as it gets. Gavin and Sarah were among the first couples to marry at Larchfield, and they still live on and farm the estate. “Events happen in the barn and gardens rather than our house, but this is still our home, and you notice everything,” Sarah says. “I think guests feel that. It’s why we’ve never wanted to be a wedding factory.”
It is also why the business exists at all. Every event is reinvested in restoring the estate. “We’re custodians rather than owners, really,” Gavin says. “The weddings, the events and the guests staying overnight are how we look after this place for the next generation.”
The formula has stayed remarkably consistent: one wedding at a time, with exclusive use of the venue spaces, genuine flexibility over suppliers, no corkage and no minimum numbers, so the same estate works for an intimate wedding or 250 guests. So has the team. Many staff have been with Larchfield for years, and 95% of couples rate the company very good or fantastic. As one bride put it, “it felt like I was organising a wedding with friends.”
All of it sits under the slogan that has followed the business for years: Make it Memorable.
Changing how weddings are priced
One of Larchfield Estate’s less visible but most lasting contributions is the way venues across the UK and Ireland now charge for their space. Larchfield was the first to introduce graded pricing, with rates varying by day of the week and month of the year rather than a single flat fee.
“It sounds obvious now, but at the time it was unusual,” Sarah explains. “A Tuesday in February is not the same as a Saturday in June, and pretending it is doesn’t help anyone. Graded pricing opened the door for couples with smaller budgets and gave us a steadier year.”
The idea travelled. After Gavin and Sarah discussed it with Hamish Shepherd, founder of the wedding planning platform Bridebook, the platform championed the approach, and it is now a format widely followed across the sector.
Real jobs, real families
No wedding is the work of a venue alone, and the Mackies are quick to share the credit. Behind every Larchfield wedding are florists, photographers, bands, caterers, cake makers, stylists, hair and make-up artists, many of them one-person businesses working evenings and weekends to make someone else’s day perfect.
“These are real jobs and real families,” Sarah says. “Some of the most talented people in this industry are working on their own, and couples often don’t see how much of themselves they put into every wedding. We wouldn’t have the reputation we have without them.”
“We’re all on the bus together,” Gavin adds. “Couples, our team and the suppliers. When everyone pulls together, every wedding is better.”
That belief is built into how Larchfield works. Its Recommended Wedding Suppliers scheme, with badges and guest blogs, helps couples find trusted local talent, and every year the estate hosts a Christmas party for suppliers to say thank you, because, as Sarah puts it, when you work alone there aren’t many staff parties.
Those relationships also sit behind Larchfield’s wedding packages, created for couples who want a no-stress option. Rather than sourcing and managing every supplier themselves, couples can choose a package that brings together some of the best suppliers in Northern Ireland, all people the Larchfield team knows and trusts. Couples who would rather build the day themselves still have complete freedom to do so.
“Some couples love planning every detail, and others just want to know it’s all in safe hands,” Sarah says. “Our packages mean they get the best of local talent without the stress, and our suppliers get to do what they do best.”
A carbon-negative wedding venue
Long before sustainability became a selling point, Larchfield was treating the estate as something to be looked after rather than used up. Today every wedding held there is carbon negative automatically, at no extra cost or effort for the couple. The estate plants up to 1,000 mostly native hardwood trees a year, keeps beehives, and is home to owls, otters and kingfishers, as well as the pedigree alpacas and miniature donkeys that tend to steal the show in wedding photos. The work has been recognised with an FSB NI Environment award.
“We don’t lecture anyone about it,” Gavin says. “It’s just built into how we run the place. If we’re doing our job properly, the estate should be in better shape in twenty years than it is now.”
Events, overnight accommodation and filming
While weddings put Larchfield on the map, the second decade has been defined by broadening what the estate offers. It now hosts around 80 events a year, from weddings to private and corporate occasions, and has built up a substantial overnight accommodation business. Self-catering cottages sleep up to 43 guests across 20 rooms, including a converted gate lodge and carriage rooms with hot tubs, alongside Myrtle, a 1952 Swiss Army truck that Gavin and Sarah converted into a glamping retreat. Whole-estate buy-outs, where a group takes over Larchfield for a few days to a week-long celebration, have become a growing part of the business, as have independent overnight stays in one of the many self-catering properties on site, with access to stunning gardens and hot tubs.
The estate has also found a second life on screen, with credits including Marcella, World on Fire, Dalgliesh, Art Detectives and The Sparticle Mysteries.
The boldest move was Think Storage, a carbon-negative self-storage facility built on the estate, with Gavin leading the build and both directing the business. It was an unusual idea for a Georgian estate, and it has paid off. In September 2026, Think Storage was named Independent Store of the Year at the FEDESSA Industry Awards in Wiesbaden, and Larchfield is in the running for the Historic Houses Diversification Award, with the winner announced in London in November 2026.
“Weddings are the beating heart of Larchfield, but no estate can rely on one income stream anymore,” Sarah says. “Historic houses survive by adapting.”
Passing it on
Both Gavin and Sarah now spend a good deal of time sharing what they have learned. Gavin chairs the Historic Houses NI Branch, while Sarah sits on the board of Historic Houses UK and its Business Development Committee and works with Historic Houses Ireland. Together they mentor venue owners in Northern Ireland and across the UK, as well as people thinking of opening their own properties to weddings, and Sarah speaks to university students about the industry.
Sarah is also a vocal advocate for nurturing talent and for making it possible to build a career while raising a family, something she and Gavin have done themselves throughout Larchfield’s story. “The best people we’ve had have often been the ones who needed a bit of flexibility,” she says. “If you give people trust, they give you so much back.”
The next twenty
So what comes next? For the Mackies, the answer is to keep doing what has worked so far: adapting to what guests want, while building the steady income a historic estate needs to look after itself.
“An estate like this never stops needing work, whether that’s roofs, walls, trees or drains,” Gavin says. “Our job is to keep changing with demand so that the income is there to look after it, year in, year out.”
“Twenty years ago we were the odd ones out,” Sarah says. “Now there are wonderful venues all over Northern Ireland, and we’re genuinely proud that we helped make that possible. Around 1,500 couples have trusted us with their wedding day, and every one of them is part of the estate’s history now. Our aim is simple: to leave Larchfield, and the industry, stronger than we found them.”
