Capital Turnaround — Attraction in Washington

First, we’ll start off with the positive aspects of our experience. Capital Turnaround is a fantastic venue: it is a large event space equipped with some stylish furniture, bar space, lighting, and screens that would have been perfect for our big 300-person wedding. They also have a large auditorium, fully equipped with a stage, sound equipment, lighting, and plenty of seats to hold our event. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, we had to significantly scale down our wedding into a virtual event and could not take full advantage of the venue’s amenities. However, because of Capital Turnaround’s infrastructure, we were able to use the auditorium and all the equipment available to create a memorable wedding we could seamlessly stream to our guests. Eddie, the venue manager, was flexible with us and allowed us to negotiate down our original contract for the scaled-back event, giving us use of the venue for a very reduced cost. During our wedding day, the venue coordinator, Jana, was very pleasant, professional, and cooperative with our planner and other vendors to make sure our event went smoothly behind the scenes.

Now for the negative aspects of our experience. The venue manager and coordinators are part of Impact Collective. Impact Collective requires the use of their preferred vendors. We were, fortunately, able to talk Impact Collective into allowing us to use our own preferred caterer as their preferred caterers weren’t able to meet our needs. After we booked the venue, Capital Turnaround initiated a construction project and it was still under construction on our wedding date and this was not communicated to us. We are glad that we significantly scaled back our event as we would have had to contend with all the construction with our wedding guests.

Impact Collective also created several challenges in our wedding planning. Eddie started an argument with our wedding planner during our walkthrough. In this confrontation, he was unnecessarily aggressive and patronizing, choosing to argue with her in front of us, adding to the anxieties of an already stressful pandemic wedding planning process. To his credit, Eddie did go out of his way later to call us to express his regrets over the argument. However, this still left us anxious about the possibility of future problems, although there were no additional issues.

To summarize, Capital Turnaround was a fantastic venue, which allowed us to carry out the vision for our wedding we had planned, pandemic and all. However, while Impact Collective worked as part of the team to make our wedding day amazing, it was not without its challenges.

Update This review was updated after a conversation with Impact Collective regarding our...

The venue is top of the line, clean, and very good looking. The renovations and design team did a great job building this space out.

However, there's more to this space than meets the eye. We were interested in this space for our wedding. The person showing us the venue sold us on everything in the space including the state of the art sound system, massive LED/LCD screens throughout the venue, and professional quality lighting. These things are "included" in the rental price. Beware though, it is never discussed that none of these technological selling points are operable without the extra costs of an in-house technician and a preferred outside production vendor. When I say extra costs, I mean upwards of $5,000+ had been quoted from two vendors to operate the "included" technology at the Capital Turnaround.

The person responsible for showing us the venue also never once indicated that there would be extra costs to essentially operate the venue. Apparently this in-house professional production manager "holds the keys to the building". It's still not clear to us what purpose the person showing us the venue serves, before or during our wedding day, if he isn't the person that knows how to run and operate the venue. Although we were brought to the table and sold on the idea/promise that there were no hidden fees or additional costs outside of the rental fee, we were essentially hit with a hidden fee. It's important to note that this hidden fee did not appear on the first version of our draft contract. It finally appeared on the Final version of our negotiated contract for a lower rental fee. This was during CoViD-19 so there was room for negotiation. The hidden fees were neither bolded in the text nor was it included in the Final negotiated contract price. Instead it was just quietly slipped in and written normally in the text without emphasis and easy to overlook and misunderstand. This type of contract behavior was disturbing to us and we pulled out of the deal before signing. I will let you come to your own conclusions about what happened here without casting aspersions, but I'm sure it's as clear to you as it was to us at the time.

Unfortunately it's hard to recommend the space because the space comes with dealing with the person we had showing us around and writing up our contract (who, turns out isn't the owner or anyone particularly important other than a middle man), but if the venue ever decides to move away from him as the face and you don't mind paying the extra $5K+ on top of your initial venue price than it wouldn't be the worst...

I've attended one event and multiple site visits at the Capital Turnaround over the past year and a half. I was invited to their Launch Party, which was amazing and put on by IMPACT Collective. From the initial red carpet walk-up, to the different musicians and photo opportunities (gorgeous greenery wall with champagne flutes, photo booth, etc.), everything was such fun. The employees at IMPACT Collective kept the flow moving, including check-in, different musicians performing, making sure the unique and tasty food stations were kept fresh, and the bars had great drink options (always important!). As I'm in the event industry, I've also attended a number of site visits with clients to the Capital Turnaround, which are led by IMPACT Collective. Clients get their questions answered in a professional and thorough manner, and IMPACT employees help explain potential layout options to meet the client's vision. I've always enjoyed my experience with both the Capital Turnaround and...