Bastide du Roy wedding

The Bastide du Roy sits above Biot on the Antibes side, behind terraced walls and olive trees, at the edge of the golf course. The house was given to Henri IV in 1608 as a wedding present and passed from Louis XV to the city of Antibes at the end of his reign, which is a longer provenance than anything else on this coast can show.

In 1924 Jeanne Lanvin bought the estate for her daughter Marie-Blanche and her son-in-law, the Comte de Polignac.

The twentieth century kept happening here after that. Mick Jagger spent the summer of 1971 at the Bastide, finishing an album; the sculptor César lived on the estate for four years with the Gismondi family, who still own it, and brought the Nice school of artists with him. None of that is on display. What you see is 365 olive trees, three walled gardens and a labyrinth.

The estate is a sequence of enclosed gardens rather than one lawn, and a wedding uses four or five of them in turn.

The ceremony space, and the reason most couples come: a circle of cypresses around a rounded lawn, overlooked by a fountain of Neptune from the eighteenth century.

Geometric and clipped, symmetrical throughout, with a pond and water features under hundred-year-old olive trees. The welcome drink goes here.

The second cocktail space, quieter than the first and more enclosed, built around a reflecting pond with old olives around it.

Where dinner goes when it is not by the pool. The bastide overlooks it, and beyond the wall are the old village of Biot, the hills and the Baie des Anges.

More than a thousand square metres around a semi-Olympic pool, edged with olive trees and umbrella pines, and the largest dinner space on the estate.

Four hundred square metres under a roof, with olive trees growing inside it and walls you barely see. It is the wet-weather answer, and it is also where the music goes at midnight, which is why it is on the price list as something included rather than as an option.

A Bastide du Roy wedding starts from €150,000 and lands near €250,000 all-in for 120 to 250 guests.

One evening, five in the afternoon until half past two, priced by guest band with tax included: €21,000 up to 100 guests, between €23,000 and €24,000 up to 180, and €26,000 up to 280. Suppliers get the estate from nine in the morning and have until five the next morning to clear it. The rates hold Thursday to Sunday.

The grounds and the gardens, the lighting of the park, the pool and the façade, the five bedrooms, a room for the children and facilities for the suppliers, the Olive Tree Pavilion, a sound kit with an engineer for the front of the house, the cleaning before and after, and the estate’s own staff: a site manager, security agents and a toilet attendant.

Furniture. No tables, no chairs, no linen, no glass, no plates. It also does not include the catering, which must come from the estate’s list of eight houses, one of them with a Michelin star, or pay the Bastide a fee of 15% for going outside it. The ceremony podium, the aisle, the dance floor and the stage for the band come from one of two suppliers the estate names, and a babysitter is compulsory as soon as any child under ten is on the guest list.

A brunch from noon until four, priced on the same bands at €6,000, €7,000 and €8,000, and available only if the wedding was the day before.

Five air-conditioned double suites with sea and mountain views, sleeping ten, with breakfast served on the terrace the next morning. They are in the hire, so the couple and the two sets of parents can stay without a separate negotiation.

Ten beds against a dinner for 280 would sink a wedding at an inland estate, though here it barely matters.

Antibes is nine minutes away and Juan-les-Pins ten, and between them they hold more hotel rooms at more price points than anywhere else on this stretch of coast. We always build the block in Antibes rather than Nice, because a guest who can walk to dinner on the Friday is a guest who does not need a coach on the Saturday.

The estate is on the avenue Jean Michard Pellissier in Antibes, on the ridge between the town and the village of Biot, with the golf course on one side.

Nice is 18 minutes, which is the shortest airport run of any private estate on this coast, and the A8 is four kilometres away. Antibes TGV is seven minutes, and the coastal line stops at Antibes, Juan-les-Pins and Biot, so guests staying along the shore can reach the wedding without a car.

Biot village is six minutes, Antibes nine, Juan-les-Pins ten and Cannes 22. Nice is 26 and Monaco 42. There are 250 parking spaces on the estate and coaches of fifty can reach it, which removes the problem that defines most Riviera venues.

The gardens do the work and they should be used in sequence rather than picked between. A ceremony inside the cypress circle, a drink in the French Garden, a second in the Spanish Garden and dinner in the courtyard is four distinct rooms in one evening, none of them a version of the last, and guests move about ninety metres in total. We always design this venue as a route instead of choosing one space and dressing it.

The hire figure is the thing that misleads people, and it is worth saying plainly.

Twenty-six thousand euros buys a great deal of ground and almost no wedding. There is no furniture at all, the catering comes from a fixed list, and the ceremony structures come from one of two suppliers, so the production is a larger share of the budget here than at a hotel and the hire is a smaller one. That is not a criticism of the estate; it is the difference between renting a place and buying an evening, and it belongs in the first conversation rather than the fourth.

The curfew is the last thing and it is two numbers rather than one. The music runs outdoors until midnight, which is an hour past what most of the Alpes-Maritimes allows, and then moves into the Olive Tree Pavilion until half past two with the bar closing at a quarter past. We always build the evening around that move rather than discovering it: the band’s last outdoor set ends at midnight and the pavilion takes the rest of the night, which on a 400 square metre floor with olive trees in it is not a downgrade.

Magic Day plans weddings at Bastide du Roy from the first conversation to the final farewell. The estate requires a coordinator on the day and says so in its own brochure, and the reason is visible in the list above: an empty garden, a fixed caterer list, two compulsory structure suppliers and a furniture order that does not exist until somebody places it.

That means the date and which band the guest list falls in, the symbolic ceremony in the Music Garden and the mairie paperwork behind it, the caterer and what leaving the list would cost, the full furniture and lighting build, the route through the gardens, the move into the pavilion at midnight, and the hotel block in Antibes.

We have worked the Alpes-Maritimes for years, with an office in Nice. Tell us the date and how many people, and we will tell you what the evening costs once the ground has been furnished.