Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Reviews

I planned and designed a wedding for a client at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles in November 2019. From my first interaction with the sales department of the museum, they were friendly, comprehensive and thorough in their communications. I felt like I had true partners in their event team and it made my job that much easier and absolutely pleasurable. ( I would work with Alyssa any time.) The final product of our design in their venue was truly epic and Pat Frey Designs would gladly create another event or wedding there! It is truly a dream venue with iconic visuals and a great team to help you create a stunning event. My team and I would highly recommend them!

Our wedding at the Natural History Museum was magical and everything we dreamed it could be! Everyone at the Museum was always very friendly, professional, and responsive! They were very understanding and flexible/accommodating, keeping us up to date on any policy changes due to the ever-changing COVID rules/restrictions which we really appreciated! Even though having a wedding at the Museum did involve more work than a standard wedding venue, especially if you are trying to stick to a budget (i.e. lots of additional logistics to consider - no changing room, the Museum is open to the public until 5pm, no kitchen; all vendors must be hired in, though the Museum has some chair/table inventory), the uniqueness of the venue and the activities you can add on (e.g. you can rent 1-hour access to some of their exhibits for a very reasonable fee) make it all worth it! I wouldn't change a thing! It was a very magical experience for my husband and I, and all our our guests also had a night to remember as well! Highly recommend! !!!:)

We had an elopement ceremony at the Museum of natural history and it was a dream come true. Our event coordinator, Simone, was absolutely fantastic. She was knowledgeable, kind, responsive, and very kind! She made the ceremony planning a breeze. The day of the event went by so smoothly with her. She made the whole process easy for us and relaxing. I absolutely recommend this venue and experience to everyone!
Our event was intimate and unique. We are so glad you we booked our event here. Thank you Simone & her team for such a positive and once in a lifetime experience.

*We also booked a photographer, Tauren Woo, who has experience shooting in this museum. He was able to fully capture our experience with beautiful lighting and angles. Thank you!

We were so happy to learn that the Natural History Museum was available to us. They were easy to book with. They have us access to the entire museum both inside and out at a reasonable rate. The NHM provided an event liaison who helped us throughout the photoshoot who gave us suggestions on where we might want to take pictures. We feel like we got to experience more thing our special day together by taking photographs in this historic and cherished Los Angeles treasure.

Getting married at the Natural History Museum was such a memorable experience. The ceremony was in the African Mammal Hall. With the right lighting and minimal floral arrangements, it looked absolutely incredible. It felt so warm and intimate. Our guests were equally enthused--pretty much everyone we talked to said it was the best wedding they have ever been to. So much of that was about the uniqueness of the venue. The dino puppet was SO great--it was playful with the younger people and very gentle with the elders. My favorite moment was when the dino laid its head on my husband's great-aunt's lap while she pet him/her. It was such a tender moment. The staff at NHM was super professional and pleasant to work with. Trust their list of preferred vendors--they've got it on lock. We were able to take pre-ceremony pictures in different parts of the museum (like the Rotunda), which will make for some very dynamic photos. It is pricey, and it will take some creative logistics (building out the kitchen on the back steps, lighting, sound, etc...) but IT'S WORTH IT!!!!

We were so lucky to have gotten married at the LA Natural History Museum! Working with the events coordinators (Jasmine and Alyssa) was such as a breeze. They were very responsive to all communication from start to finish. The museum is such a special venue for a wedding and they did an expert job helping us navigate the process by providing us with extremely helpful recommendations. Alyssa was also present on the day of the wedding, and she helped ensure that the day went smoothly. All our guests were blown away by the uniqueness and the joyful elegance of the venue. I highly recommend checking it out if you are interested in an unforgettable venue!

Thank you so much to the wonderful people from the museum. We were able to book this museum for our elopement to be held an hour before their opening hour to help us ensure we could get married on the date we wanted. We got married on our 10th yr dating anniversary. My now husband had proposed on our 9th yr anniversary right after we visited this museum and so it was a very special place for us which is why we wanted to get married there. We weren’t having a big wedding nor party nor booking a whole floor and yet the staff always made us feel like this was as special event to them as it was to us. After our elopement we changed clothing and many staff members working congratulated us as we spent the day at the museum because they saw our elopement as they were arriving for their shifts. It was amazing and I highly recommend this beautiful place with beautiful grounds and amazing staff. Thank you!!

Officiant: Mobile Reverend A Mauricio Lubong
Photographer: Carrie Rogers based in Los Angeles

Unique, elegant, and lovely, my husband and I immediately fell in love with the idea of getting married at the Natural History Museum. My mom was horrified by the idea of such a non-traditional venue, but we pulled it off and had a gorgeous and traditional wedding, that happens to be in a unique venue. Courtney was a huge help during our 19 month engagement. All of our guests can't stop raving about how it was the most memorable, fun, and beautiful wedding they've been to. There are so many photo ops. By getting married there, we got to experience a year as a fellows member. We loved getting to experience the museum during it's pivotal expansion and renovation phase. Check out the NHMLA Events Blog for photos of weddings held at the museum.
Thanks, Courtney and NHMLA!

We had our ceremony and reception at the museum and it was absolutely perfect. Our main contact at the museum was Courtney. She was an amazing person to work with - responsive, creative, unbelievably helpful, enthusiastic, professional, calm and fun! She worked wonderfully with me directly before we hired our wedding planner and continued that great relationship once our planner was involved. Courtney knows how to talk to brides, grooms, parents, planners and other vendors. She is calm in the face of a storm, provides excellent suggestions when asked for them and can help to provide solutions when there are problems and went out of her way to help us in pulling everything together.

The museum itself is amazing and has unlimited photo opportunities. And it just keeps getting better with all the new exhibits. As another reviewer mentioned, there are time restrictions. We were very nervous about the limited load in time for our ridiculous number of vendors. However, the staff at the museum is very experienced with this and it was not a problem in the least.

I know it isn't the least expensive place to hold your wedding, but there are so many other benefits that outweigh the pure costs. A portion of the fees are tax-deductible and you also get a membership to the museum which gives you access to invitations for a number of special events. There are venues in Los Angeles that are comparably priced that don't provide those benefits, nor could they accommodate the size of our group (240 people) and frankly - those other places don't provide dinosaurs as the backdrop for your ceremony.

We had an absolutely unforgettable wedding and reception - not just for ourselves, but for many of our guests. The setting of the museum was perfect and I wouldn't have wanted to do it anywhere else.

We had our cocktail hour in the Grand Foyer and dinner at the African Mammal Hall on 3/20/2010 (we did our ceremony in the Rose Garden outside the museum). This venue was the BEST PART of the whole wedding process. There isn't enough good things I can say about them. The event coordinators, Courtney and Melissa, are such dolls to work with! They were so responsive, creative and just plain fun! The museum was simply stunning! My husband and I are real science dorks so it seemed fitting to have our reception under a pair of dinosaurs. We loved the venue so much, we added dinosaurs into our wedding theme (as cake toppers, dino-eggs as place cards, and dinos on our invitations and programs). Our guests were BLOWN AWAY at the reception. It's just awesome to have the whole first floor of the museum to yourselves. However, my husband and I were allowed to go ANYWHERE in the museum... so we took really cool pics next to the exhibits. Absolutely awesome!

The only downside I can see is that it is the most expensive venue we looked at. The charge starts at $8k just to rent out the Grand Foyer. The venue providers tables and chairs, but that's it. You have to bring in your own caterer, DJ, decorator, etc.

Some details: You event must be between 6pm - 11pm (you can pay extra to stay longer but you cant rent any earlier than 6pm). They have tables and chairs enough for 300+ people. Your rental price includes one year membership to the museum (so you are invited to all these fancy member events throughout the year).

But it was definitely worth every penny. I just LOVED venue. What an experience!

We could write and speak endlessly about the appreciation we have for the NHMLA event team. During the most unpredictable, unstable, and frightening time of the pandemic, this team was reliable, reassuring, helpful, compassionate, generous, and extremely kind.

As one might imagine, during 2021 & 2022, due to all the fluctuating mandates in LA, and our personal unexpected life events, we had a great deal to manage for our wedding banquet. From supply shortages, vendors falling through, and unpredictable attendance, the team was flexible and patient beyond what we could have imagined was possible.

It was a core value for our wedding banquet to be comprised completely of only our community and not anyone outside it. And the team worked hard to allow that to happen. Therefore all of our food "vendors," decor team, photographer, and all other activities people were friends of ours, who could celebrate this very special life change with us. It made this beautifully large space and enormity of the event feel very intimate and familial.

We never had to wait much for a response to our questions, and they were very patient when we were overwhelmed with this and other life events to communicate immediately. We are grateful for their patience.

The NHMLA is a special place for my husband and me and we will treasure our moment to realize our union with our friends and family there for the rest of our lives.

I am so happy that the LA Natural History Museum special events team was able to accommodate us for our engagement photoshoot! My fiance and I wanted to have our wedding here, but it was not within our budget. So the next best thing was to schedule an engagement photoshoot here! The 'non-commercial photography' options that they offer is much more affordable and totally worth it! We had the entire museum to ourselves, after it had closed to the public, and it was so cool to be able to walk around and marvel in the museum's beauty. I felt like a kid again! We only booked the space for one hour but in hindsight I definitely recommend booking at least 2 hours. There is so much to see and so many good photo opportunities! The staff were also super friendly and accommodating. We got caught in horrible traffic and ended up being almost THIRTY minutes late to our appointment time! Words can't describe how anxious and frustrated I was while trying to get there. But as soon as we got there, everyone was very understanding and they ended up letting us stay for a full hour anyways. We ended up having such a fun time and I can't wait to go back to the museum as a visitor soon!

My name is Kaci Mallat, and I am the owner of Xoxo Weddings. I have had the honor to coordinate several weddings at the Natural History Museum. The venue is an extremely unique space that any wedding guest can leave truly knowing they had experienced something that cannot be replicated! I know who can say they had cocktails next to a dinosaur!!! It is a very detail heave venue, but that is why you get a coordinator:). This venue will leave you with tons of memories!

I love everything about NHMLA. The venue is amazing, clean, and air conditioned (big plus for me). It's even more spectacular at night. The coordinators at NHMLA were absolutely amazing! They were so responsive and helpful with all of my questions. They provided us with a packet of instructions/rules, venue requirements, recommended vendors, and very clear diagrams of the spaces we rented. I know they hold a lot of events at NHMLA, but as a Bride they always made me feel very special which really made the whole experience (from planning to wedding day) unforgettable. Thank you!

First of all, the venue itself is fantastic. They close off entire first floor for you, 4-11, with no duplicate events on the same night. You can pay extra to keep the gem hall and/or creature habitat open, and to stay later. We got many, many comments about how awesome the venue was. The museum is truly beautiful.

They reserve the night for you, so you have first choice over a newcomer before officially paying. The museum has its own dedicated staff who will do their best to coordinate the night invisibly from behind the scenes, and dang do they do a good job. They will even make sure that the bride and groom do not see each other when they are coming out of the same door!

The museum's event coordinator, Melissa, was easy to get on the phone and answered all my questions timely.

My only problem was that Courtney, the wedding coordinator, was sometimes hard to reach. This could be due to the busy season, as she suddenly became available and responsive again. The day of it was also hard to track her down when something went wrong since her cell was off, but as she was obviously coordinating it's hard to fault her. The problem also got fixed fairly quickly.

There is no overnight storage due to the logistics of the museum.

The entire staff, especially Courtney, obviously love weddings and genuinely do their best to make sure that the night goes as smoothly as possible. They work hard and enthusiastically to make the day as stress free as possible and to give you the greatest flexibility in decoration and planning. You can consult them, visit the museum...they try to be as accommodating as possible.

The venue is full-service, also, which is a huge load off the mind, and comes with an included rehearsal.

We were very happy with our wedding here.

My husband and I decided we were going to get married here before we were even engaged. We went to one of the First Friday events there, and fell in love (with the venue). We spent most of our money making this our venue, and it seemed like a lot when we first started looking at the prices. But from what I've heard from friends and people in the wedding industry, it isn't that much more expensive than a lot of other (less amazing) venues. You get three spaces for one price. We had our ceremony in front of the dueling dinos; then everyone moved into the North American Mammal Hall for cocktail hour; and then into the African Mammal Hall for dinner and dancing. The venue is a showstopper. Almost everyone we invited came... we hardly had any people RSVP "no." Because no one wants to miss a wedding at The Natural History Museum!
The other giant perk here is that you hardly need any decor. The museum is already beautiful and interesting on its own. I almost didn't write this review because our wedding was so special and unique I almost don't want anyone else to get married there. Haha. That sounds crazy. But it was really our best decision. We have had so many guests tell us this was the best wedding they have ever been to, and normally I would take that with a grain of salt and think that they were just trying to be nice, but it WAS an amazing wedding, and we've heard it from SO many people. I'm starting to believe them. The venue made it. You can't get much cooler than a ceremony in front of dinosaur fossils and a dance party in from of a herd of elephants.

Held both my ceremony and reception at the museum. It was absolutely amazing and beautiful and I highly recommend it!!

The museum has tables and chairs available. All other rentals, catering, beverages must be provided with outside vendors. (I went with Weiler's Deli in Northridge, Ca who made it perfect)

The special events team at the museum, Courtney and Melissa, are fantastic and really great to work with! Both mammoth halls have beautiful detailing and are an amazing space for any special event. The foyer with the dinosaurs is a dramatic and wonderful space, particularly in the evenings with lighting. This is truly a unique venue with an amazing feel and ambiance which is made even better by the great people there who will go out of their way to make your event perfect.

The absolutely only drawback is that events must start after the museum closes to the public - so the earliest your event can start is 6pm. Our reception ended at 11pm and I did not want to leave.... =)