Antibes wedding

An Antibes wedding runs €100,000 to €1.8 million all-in. Magic Day weddings here start from €100,000.

That is the widest spread of any commune on this coast, and it is not a range of weddings so much as a range of addresses.

Hôtel Belles Rives sits on the beach at Juan-les-Pins and starts from €100,000. Bastide du Roy is a private estate behind the town and starts from €150,000. Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc is on its own peninsula and starts from €200,000, rising beyond €1.8 million taken whole, where the figure is the same at forty guests as it is at three hundred.

Three venues, one commune, and an order of magnitude between the ends of it.

Three properties, each with a page of its own.

Read the curfew column before anything else. It is the one that differs most across this commune and the one couples discover last.

On the tip of Cap d’Antibes in twenty-two acres of pines, with the Glasshouse seating 400 at banquet, a ballroom seating 200 and a pool deck cut into the rock. A hundred and nine keys, and weddings only in April and from mid-September to mid-October.

A private bastide behind Antibes with formal gardens laid out in the seventeenth century, taking 280, with an Olive Tree Pavilion of 400 square metres that lets the party run to half past two. Five bedrooms, so the guest list sleeps in town.

The art deco hotel on the water at Juan-les-Pins, where Fitzgerald wrote, with its own beach and jetty. Ninety seated or 250 standing, 43 rooms, and the strictest sound limit on this coast.

This is the section the page exists for.

Three venues in one commune give three completely different answers, and the reason is not municipal policy. It is who lives next door.

Seventy-nine decibels, monitored. No live band at any point in the evening. A DJ may play from eleven, and the music stops at half past midnight.

Juan-les-Pins is a dense resort with apartments above and beside the hotel, and seventy-nine decibels is about twenty below what the rest of this coast runs its limiters at. That is a design constraint rather than a detail: it shapes what the evening can be before a single supplier is booked.

Outdoor music to midnight, then half past two inside the Olive Tree Pavilion, with the bar closing at a quarter past.

An hour of outdoor music past eleven is worth having on this coast, and the pavilion is a room rather than a marquee, so the party changes setting at midnight instead of ending.

Eleven outdoors. With the buyout, dancing and music indoors all night; without it, until one in the morning in the ballroom.

Cap d’Antibes is a private peninsula of large grounds and few neighbours, and the hotel’s own buyout is what removes the constraint rather than any negotiation with the commune.

Not in practice. Antibes has its own mairie and French law puts the civil ceremony there, but the residency requirement attached to it rules out most foreign couples.

So couples marry at home first and hold a symbolic ceremony here, which is what all three venues arrange and plan around.

Nice Côte d’Azur is the airport, and it is close to all three.

Bastide du Roy is 18 minutes, Hôtel Belles Rives 24, and Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc between 25 and 35 depending on what the Bord de Mer is doing.

Antibes has its own station on the Marseille to Ventimiglia line, which matters more here than almost anywhere else on this coast: Nice is twenty minutes by train and Cannes fifteen, so guests staying either side can arrive without a car and without a transfer budget.

The one road to watch is the Cap itself. The peninsula has a single route round it, and a convoy of cars at midnight behaves accordingly.

May to October, and two things narrow it.

Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc gives weddings only in April and from the middle of September to the middle of October. Those are the dates the hotel releases, and they are not negotiable, so a wedding there is a calendar decision before it is a budget one.

And nowhere in Antibes takes a wedding during the Cannes Film Festival in May. Cannes is fifteen minutes down the coast, the hotels fill, the rates move and the roads stop working. Belles Rives says so explicitly and the others behave as though they had.

Two of the three venues are hotels, which is unusual on this coast and makes the planning easier than it looks.

Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc has 109 keys and Hôtel Belles Rives 43, so at either the guest list sleeps where the wedding happens. Bastide du Roy has five bedrooms, and a wedding there puts everyone in Antibes, Juan-les-Pins or Nice, all inside half an hour.

Antibes old town has the volume for a hundred-guest wedding across several hotels, and the train means guests can be placed in Nice without a transfer problem.

Choose the venue by how loud you want to be.

Everywhere else on this coast the curfew is a detail you check late. In Antibes it is the first question, because seventy-nine decibels with no live band and half past two in a pavilion are not two versions of the same evening. We always ask a couple what the night looks like before we ask what the budget is, and in this commune that order saves a site visit.

The second thing is that Eden-Roc’s calendar is narrower than its price. The hotel takes weddings in April and for a month from mid-September, and those dates go a long way out. A couple set on that hotel is choosing a window first and everything else second, and the budget conversation only matters once the window exists.

The third is Bastide du Roy’s pavilion, which is the most underrated room in Antibes. Four hundred square metres with a roof means the party genuinely changes setting at midnight rather than being moved indoors as a compromise, and it is why the estate holds 280 guests to half past two when the hotels on either side of it cannot.

Then there is the train. Antibes station puts Nice twenty minutes away and Cannes fifteen, which quietly removes the transport line that dominates most Riviera budgets. For a guest list staying across the coast it is worth more than it sounds.

Magic Day has been established on the French Riviera since 2010.

We plan weddings in Antibes from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the venue chosen against the curfew rather than the photographs, the Eden-Roc window secured if that is the hotel, the symbolic ceremony arranged around a civil marriage at home, the sound designed to the limit at Juan-les-Pins, the pavilion used properly at the Bastide, the rooms blocked across the old town, and the Film Festival avoided.

We have worked this coast for years. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you which of these three can hold it and what it comes to.