Our History & Team

The people, a wedding,
and a house worth saving.

Rixey Manor has been standing since 1801. What follows is the people who look after it now, the wedding its columned front was built for, and, told straight, where the house came from.

Aerial view of Rixey Manor, a 225-year-old wedding venue on 30 acres in Rixeyville, Northern Virginia

Isadora Martin-Dye, owner of Rixey Manor, at the ceremony altar with autumn foliage and the lake behind her

Isadora Martin-Dye, owner of Rixey Manor since 2014.

How Rixey Manor Came to Be

She found it on Zillow. It was derelict. She bought it anyway.

Before all this, Isadora spent years in Los Angeles working in film, TV, and talent management — running her own company, working on productions like The Hunger Games. That world trained her in the things that matter most: high-pressure logistics, an eye for detail, and knowing how to make a hundred moving parts look effortless on the day.

She found a foreclosed 1801 estate on Zillow. The building had been abandoned. The grounds were overgrown. Most people would have kept scrolling.

She didn't. She bought it, moved in, and started restoring it by hand.

That was 2014. Since then, Rixey Manor has hosted over 350 weddings. Hall of Fame status on The Knot. Couples who write long notes years later to say it was the best decision they made.

What hasn't changed: one wedding at a time. That was the original standard and it remains the standard. Not because it's a marketing line — Isadora knows what happens to a place when you start running it like a factory. It stops being a place.

Couples often say they felt like they were staying in a friend's home. That's the goal. It's also, genuinely, what it is.

Qualifications & Recognition

Certified Elite Wedding Planner
Member of The Knot Hall of Fame
350+ weddings personally planned and coordinated
Inclusive, LGBTQ+ affirming & culturally fluent
Dual UK / US citizenship — international client friendly

Featured In

Martha Stewart Weddings · Washingtonian Weddings · People Magazine · The Venue Report · Style Me Pretty · Refinery29 · Virginia Bride Magazine

The Team

The people who run your day.

The core team is intentionally small, and many of the people here have been doing this for more than ten years. That kind of loyalty is rare in hospitality. We think it shows on the day.

Grace, the venue manager at Rixey Manor wedding venue in Rixeyville, Virginia

Grace

Venue Manager

For over ten years, Grace has been the steady hand behind our events. Originally from New York State, she balances the job with being a proud mom to her son. She lives in the details: vendor coordination, timelines, floor plans, the hundred small things that have to line up for a day to feel effortless. Her precision is what lets us offer a flexible catering policy, because we know every "i" will be dotted and every "t" crossed.

She is also, affectionately, our grandmother wrangler. Her warmth keeps family members feeling cared for and included, the excited grandmothers especially, so that mothers can focus entirely on their daughters. Getting Grace to pose for a photograph is notoriously hard. Looking after a young party guest, it turns out, was too tempting to resist.

The Bartending Team

Behind the Bar

Our bartenders are hired exclusively through us, and they are part of the fabric of the place. Some have been here since our very first wedding. A few loved Rixey so much they chose it for their own day. They do not just pour drinks. They carry the same standard we teach everyone here: professional, attentive, genuinely warm.

You will often find Cousin Adam behind the bar. He came to us after hiking the Appalachian Trail, lives on the estate, and is known for a dry wit that guests adore. Sharp humor aside, he is one of the most reliable people we have, as good at troubleshooting a setup as he is at mixing a drink. From the first pour to the final farewell, the team keeps things seamless so you and your guests can just be present.

The extended event team, the setup crew, day-of staff, and breakdown, scales to whatever your wedding needs. Isadora leads all of it, and her story is above.

Whoever you are, and whoever you love, this team is glad you are here.

One wedding at a time. Every time.

The House

The front was built for a wedding.

The grand columned front that everyone photographs is not as old as it looks. It is a Classical Revival addition, built for a wedding: the 1928 marriage of James Marion Dyer and Margaret Robinson Lewis. The same steps where couples now line up for their portraits were raised for the two of them.

They never left. Fifty years on, in 1978, James and Margaret were still the owners of this house, and they marked their golden wedding anniversary on the very same steps. The front was made for their marriage, and it held them the whole way.

Handed down the female line.

Here is the thread we love most. Through the generations the estate mostly passed down through the women of the Rixey family, not the usual way these things went in Virginia. The family kept it into the mid-1990s. So when Isadora bought the derelict house in 2014 and made it hers, she was, without setting out to, carrying on a place that has nearly always been in women's hands. It still is.

The Rixey name is still woven through this place, and the family are still part of our lives. They are our neighbors. They have worked here, celebrated here, and chosen Rixey Manor to say their own vows. Their blessing meant a great deal at the start, and it still does.

A name you may already know.

The wider Rixey legacy is worth a detour. If you studied at Marymount University you will know Rixey House, one of the cornerstone buildings on campus. The family tree runs from a university founder to presidential physicians to a genuine sports legend. Baseball Hall of Famer Eppa Rixey was born right here in Culpeper.

Where It Came From

It started as a farmhouse. We won't paper over the rest.

Long before the columns and the weddings, this was farmland, and the house had another name: Pleasant Hill. The lane still carries it. The Rixey family held the land through a grant that reached back to the years after the Revolutionary War, but the house itself was a plain working farmhouse, not the white-columned mansion people picture today. For most of its life this was a family farm, hogs and all.

AI-assisted reconstruction of Pleasant Hill, the original Rixey Manor farmhouse, before its Classical Revival columned front was added for the 1928 wedding. — Pleasant Hill, the farmhouse that became Rixey Manor, as it looked before the columned front was added for the 1928 wedding.An AI-assisted reconstruction by Isadora, a British historian who also teaches responsible AI use. Built from the surviving architectural evidence, old photographs, and documentary research, with AI used only to visualise the research, not to invent it, exactly the standard she teaches: use the tool, disclose it, never let it make things up.

Every estate of this age in Virginia was built on the labour of enslaved people, and we will not pretend this one was any different. The family who came to hold this estate were Virginia farmers. One of them, Richard Henry Lewis, who married into the Rixey family and died at Rosedale, then part of the Rixey estate, rode for the Confederacy with the Black Horse Cavalry. His family enslaved people. One of them we can name: a craftsman called Henry, who made the spurs that cavalry wore into the war.

We cannot undo any of that, and we will not paper over it. What we can decide is what this place is now. When we weigh a decision about Rixey today, we ask whether it would make the estate's original owners turn in their graves, and when the answer is a firm yes, we know we are pointing the right way. This is now somewhere every couple, of any race, religion, or orientation, is safe, celebrated, and genuinely welcome.

The rest is unfinished work. Isadora is a British historian, and she is still researching this house and the people bound to it. The aim is not the owners, whose names are easy to find. It is the enslaved men, women and children whose lives were written out of the record and who deserve to have their stories told too. A plaque on the old blacksmith shop stands in their memory, and as we recover names, they will go here. If you are descended from anyone enslaved on this land, we would be honoured to hear from you.

And we keep it standing. Some of the skill in the oldest parts of this house, the carving, the joinery, the brickwork, was the work of enslaved hands. The surest way we know to honour it is to make sure the building is never again left derelict and at risk of being lost, the way it once was. It came close. Not again.

That welcome is not just a feeling. What we commit to for LGBTQ+ couples and families, disabled couples, couples with chronic illness, and neurodivergent couples is named in writing, in every contract. See exactly what we promise →

Your wedding at Rixey Manor

Come and see it
for yourself.

We want to learn about your wedding as much as tell you about the venue. That takes about an hour.

Or call us: (540) 212-4545Yes, you can text.