The Woodland Suite sits a floor up from the ICC Wales main hall, and it is a different night entirely. Where the hall is a 4,000-square-metre flat floor you have to fill, the Woodland Suite is a proper ballroom - floor-to-ceiling glass down one side looking into the trees, terraces off the foyer, a room that feels like a destination rather than a hangar. Everything we run comes up in the goods lift, and by the time the conference delegates have swapped lanyards for a drink, The Brotherhood is line-checked and ready behind a closed set of doors.
The Woodland Suite at a glance
The Woodland Suite is on the first floor of ICC Wales, the largest conference and events venue in Wales, in the grounds of the Celtic Manor Resort at Coldra Woods off junction 24 of the M4. It is 875 square metres of pillar-free space seating around 560 for a banquet and dividing into three, with floor-to-ceiling windows onto the woodland and outdoor terraces off the foyer. It is the room ICC Wales puts a conference dinner, an awards night or a hospitality evening into when the main hall is more space than the event needs - big enough to throw a serious party, contained enough that you can read the whole room from the stage. With over 1,000 hotel bedrooms across the resort next door, guests stay on site and nobody is watching the clock for a taxi.
Getting a full rig to the first floor
A first-floor room sounds like a load-in headache and is the opposite here. Loading bay 2 sits in the lower basement, round the back of the venue, and you can reverse a van almost to the lift doors - two large lifts side by side, no shuffling flightcases through a public foyer. They come out on level 1 directly opposite the Woodland Suite, so backline - and a PA and lighting rig when we are bringing it - go from truck to room in one clean move. Staging, banqueting tables and the floor layout are the venue’s to set: we turn up to a stage built at one end with the dancefloor in front, and just need the space on it for the whole band.
Power is handled properly too: 13-amp and 16-amp sockets throughout, four 16-amp either side of the room, and when we are running our own gear we use pro 16-amp cabling and keep the runs tidy. The main hall’s big galas usually run on house or external production, but the Woodland Suite is a room where we can also provide the PA and lighting ourselves - the same rig we run for the Christmas nights at the Caernarfon Suite over at Celtic Manor, a comparable-sized room on comparable 16-amp circuits, so it covers a space this scale with headroom to spare. That way a client can book band and production in one go rather than bringing in a separate company. We run in-ear monitors throughout, no floor wedges, which keeps a glass-walled room clean and the front-of-house mix in our control. The conference can run elsewhere in the building while we load in and line-check during the day, so the band is ready well before doors and out of the way until it is time.
What size band the room wants
The Woodland Suite is the room where you do not need the full eleven to fill it - though you can. At banqueting scale, an eight-piece with vocals, full rhythm and a couple of horns sits right: enough weight to drive a few hundred people on a dancefloor, intimate enough that the front row is part of the show rather than watching it from distance. From there it flexes both ways - The Brotherhood scales from five to eleven, so a tighter hospitality evening can take a smaller line-up and a flagship awards night can take the full brass-led showband. For a ballroom this size we would usually point a booker at the eight or nine-piece with horns as the sweet spot, then size up or down to the budget and the night.
Conference, dinner, then the band
The Woodland Suite runs the classic corporate arc: a day of sessions, a drinks reception, a three-course dinner, then the band. We play two roughly hour-long sets blended in our own style - mashups and medleys so the energy climbs rather than resetting between numbers - with a DJ carrying the floor through to a late finish. It is the best kind of crowd to walk out to: they have sat through a full day, had a few drinks with dinner, and they are ready to move the moment the first song lands. The kitchens back straight onto the room, so plated dinners run to time and the turnaround from the last course to the first downbeat is quick. We always want the running order and the tone in advance - an awards night times the band to peak once the trophies are done, a conference after-party can go hard from the first note.
Working with the ICC Wales events team
ICC Wales is built to run a live-music night on top of a full day of business, and the events team are organised about it - clear on schedule, sensible about load-in windows around the daytime programme, and used to a band that brings its own production. We plan the arrival, the soundcheck slot and the flip from dinner to dancefloor with them in advance, so on the night the band is the easy part of the day rather than the part that needs managing. That is the difference a venue this well run makes: nobody is improvising at 9pm.
Based 20 minutes away in Newport, The Brotherhood play the Woodland Suite and the main hall at ICC Wales most months of the year. Check our availability for your conference dinner, awards night or Christmas party, or see how we approach corporate events across South Wales.
