Bastide de Puget wedding

The bastide stands at Meyreuil, on the plain between Aix and the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, behind iron gates and a wall of ivy. It is an ochre eighteenth-century house with pale blue shutters and a pediment, the plain Provençal kind rather than the grand one, and it has been a family house throughout.

Four hectares of park surround it, with ponds, fountains and statues set among plane trees that were planted three hundred years ago.

Those trees are the reason to come. They make a green ceiling over the gravel in front of the house, and dinner is laid under them, which means an outdoor wedding in August that is not a wedding in full sun. The family has been running receptions here for more than twenty years.

The brochure runs the day through the park and ends indoors, and it is the right way round for this house.

The ceremony space: a long lawn in front of the bastide with the pond at one end, set with white chairs. A refreshment table with lemonade and iced tea meets guests as they arrive.

Where the aperitif happens, in the shade of the park, with wrought-iron garden tables and rattan lounges seating fifty.

Dinner. The terrace lights come on as it gets dark and a seventy-metre festoon runs between the trees above the tables, which is in the hire rather than a line on a production budget.

A hundred and eighty square metres of rooms with chandeliers and papered walls, where the dancing goes and where dinner moves if the weather turns. With the covered terrace and the annex beside them they hold the full 180.

Sixteen metres by eight, with a certified lifeguard, and the shade where the brunch is laid the next day.

A Bastide de Puget wedding starts from €100,000 and lands near €200,000 all-in for 80 to 180 guests.

Three things move the rate: the season, the day of the week and how long you stay. Out of season a weekday night is €8,000 and the full three days and two nights €12,000. In high season, which runs from the end of May to late September, a weekday night is €9,000, a Friday or a bank holiday €10,000 and a two-day weekend €13,000, with the three-day weekend landing between €15,000 and €16,000. Saturday on its own is not sold.

More than a hire fee usually does. The four bedrooms with their bathrooms, round tables and white Napoleon III chairs, the lighting of the park, the façades, the parking and the pool, and the festoon over the dinner. An extra bed is thirty euros a night.

One house, which the family has used for more than twenty years and which does not charge its delivery fee here. Its basic offer is about €137 a head with tax at 100 guests or more, and the rate climbs as the party shrinks, to about €166 at 60 and about €192 at 30, because the brigade does not get smaller with the guest list. The next-day brunch runs between thirty and forty-five euros a head.

The flowers and the design, the music, the photography, the transfers, and the hotel rooms for everybody beyond the eight the house sleeps.

Four double rooms of thirty square metres each on the first floor, with private bathrooms, sleeping eight, or as many as eleven with the extra beds the bastide can put in. They are part of the privatisation rather than a separate booking, so the house belongs to the wedding overnight.

Eight beds against a dinner for 180 is the limitation here and it is a real one.

What makes it workable is where the estate sits. Hotels and guesthouses start four kilometres away, and Aix is 21 minutes, so the hotel block is a city rather than a scramble of villages. We always put the two families in the house and everybody else in Aix, because guests who want a bar after midnight have one and the bastide does not have to be it.

The bastide is on the Chemin de Bourtin at Meyreuil, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, between Aix-en-Provence and the Montagne Sainte-Victoire.

Aix is 21 minutes, Marseille 32 and Cassis 38. Nice is close to two hours, so this is Provence and not the Riviera.

Marseille airport is 35 minutes. Aix-en-Provence TGV is 26 and Marseille Saint-Charles 31, and the train is the better answer for anyone already in Europe. The bastide’s own figures of fifteen, twenty and thirty minutes are optimistic by five or six each, which matters when a coach is being timed.

The plane trees decide the shape of the day and they are worth building around. Three-hundred-year-old trees make a roof over the dinner, so a July wedding here eats outside at eight without anybody sitting in the sun, and the festoon strung between them does the lighting that a marquee would have needed a rig for. We always put dinner under them rather than on the lawn, whatever the guest list.

The second thing is the five o’clock finish, which is not a boast.

The Bouches-du-Rhône bans amplified music outdoors at venues and in their gardens, so the dancing was always going to be in the salons. What the bastide does is stop arguing with that and sell the floor until five in the morning, which no other venue we work with in Provence offers. A couple who wants a long night gets one here; a couple who wants a band on the lawn cannot have it anywhere in this département.

The third is the per-head scale, and it changes who this venue suits. The caterer’s rate rises as the guest list falls, so a wedding of thirty pays about €192 a head where a wedding of a hundred pays about €137. Below about sixty guests the economics stop favouring this estate, and we say so early rather than at the quotation.

Magic Day plans weddings at Bastide de Puget from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the date and which of the six rates it falls under, the symbolic ceremony on the lawn and the mairie paperwork behind it, the menu with the bastide’s own caterer, the design under the plane trees, the four bedrooms and the hotel block in Aix, and the coaches out from the city.

We have worked across Provence for years, and the country between Aix and Sainte-Victoire is the part of it guests find easiest. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people, and we will tell you what the estate comes to and what the caterer will add.