A Small Chapel in Chatham County Provides an Intimate Space to Say “I Do”

The Parlour at Manns Chapel | 175 Poythress Rd, Chapel Hill

With their mission to “Love Big, Celebrate Small,” the two women behind the venue The Parlour at Manns Chapel were advocating for intimate gatherings long before they became a government mandate.

Aimee Flynn and Yvette Navarro met 10 years ago while working as design educators at the Art Institute of Durham. After organizing a handful of functions for the college, the pair realized their passion and prowess for events and decided they wanted to open their own venue. In 2013, they bought a small, abandoned Methodist church in Chatham County and spent the next two years restoring it.

“The community really loves the building, so we wanted to save as much as we could through thoughtful reuse,” Flynn says. “We kept the original stained glass windows, the original pine floors, the original signs.”

As a nod to local history, Flynn and Navarro made their venue’s mascot the Chatham rabbit.

“In the 1800s, everybody was hunting Chatham rabbits, because they were meatier and really prosperous,” Flynn says. “When we arrived and the building was in such sad condition, we wanted to bring back prosperity to the corner that it sits on.”

Their commitment to incorporating historical touches and repurposing the chapel’s fixtures speaks to the way they let the building define their brand.

“We’re very focused on reuse and rethinking how we do things,” Flynn says. “Because The Parlour is such an intimate venue—our capacity is 100 people or less—we made our motto ‘’Refashioning the Art of Gathering.’”

Although Flynn and Navarro had initially envisioned The Parlour as a space for chef dinners and creative workshops, they quickly found a fondness for weddings, after putting on a few ceremonies for friends. They transformed the chapel’s pastor offices into a bridal suite and groom’s room, and repurposed the outdoor space to be a cocktail patio and garden courtyard for receptions. To cement their status as a wedding venue, Flynn and Navarro created a second, more specific mantra for The Parlour: ‘Love Big, Celebrate Small.’

The impulse to make one’s wedding an extravagant production is understandable. Big weddings have been the norm for well over a century: after they emerged in the 1800s as a status symbol, businesses pushed the ideal to the broader American public through commercial marketing. In hammering the rhetoric that weddings necessitate a photographer, a caterer, a DJ, and numerous bit players, the industry has formed a subtext: if you’re going to tie the knot, you need to do it in front of a big audience.

These days, the average U.S. wedding has 131 guests and costs upwards of $30,000, according to The Knot’s 2019 Real Weddings Study. Weddings at The Parlour average around 60 guests, though the venue also hosts plenty of ceremonies with fewer than 20 people.

“Weddings don’t have to be a big show,” Flynn says. “All you need is a small group of people you’re close to. You can hug everybody, you can share a conversation across the table, you can be in on every joke.”

Cutting down a guest list eliminates the urge to splurge on theatrics, Flynn says, allowing couples to invest more of their budget into services that will make for a meaningful experience. Couples who rent out The Parlour receive access to a “handpicked experts list,” a catalog of Triangle vendors who Flynn and Navarro collaborate with on a regular basis. The list includes local florists, photographers, caterers, and other vendors.

Jacob Boehm, executive chef and owner of Durham’s Snap Pea Catering, is one of them. When Boehm caters weddings at The Parlour, he often creates concept meals inspired by a couple’s love story.

“I solicit stories from their friends and family,” Boehm says. “Then, during the meal, I have those people give a toast and we bring out a course that’s based on that.”

An example: At one wedding in February 2020, after a couple’s friend mentioned the bride having a “heart of gold,” Boehm created a course featuring charcoal grilled lamb heart and leaf lettuce wraps stuffed with crispy Carolina gold rice.

“[Small weddings] allow for a greater sense of intentionality,” Boehm says. “These kinds of concept meals that we do don’t work that well with a bunch of people.”

After spending five years carrying the torch for small gatherings, Flynn says it almost felt “comic” when the pandemic hit.

“All these other venues were trying to say they could do micro weddings,” Flynn says, “We were like, ‘We’ve been doing this the whole time!’”

For the first few months of the pandemic, as with most businesses, The Parlour closed its doors. But Flynn and Navarro were determined to uphold their pledge to foster prosperity in their corner of the community, even when the building was void of activity. So in May 2020, they launched a “Lights On” campaign, decking the chapel with thousands of lights and inviting locals to snap pictures and honk hello as they drove by.

“We wanted to be a beacon of hope,” Flynn says. “We wanted people to see the lights and be like, ‘It’s gonna be OK.’”

The Parlour reopened for micro weddings and elopements in June 2020, postponing ceremonies with more than 50 guests to 2021. Between August and March, Flynn kept the space alive and thrumming by using it as a small classroom for her daughter and several other first-graders in their “pod.”

Before the pandemic, Flynn and Navarro spent a lot of time coaching couples on how to pare down their guest lists, offering strategies for telling coworkers and college acquaintances that they didn’t make the cut.

“I don’t think we have to teach them anymore,” Flynn says. “This pandemic was a wake-up call that showed us the people who actually mean something to us, the people who we talk to on a daily basis.”

Of course, some couples will still want the big country club, the buffet, and the colossal guest list, she adds. But as we emerge from a year spent in isolation, Navarro says people have a new understanding of what makes a gathering meaningful.

“It’s not about putting on a grand performance,” she says. “It’s about being together with the people you love.”

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