Cap Ferrat wedding

A Cap Ferrat wedding runs €100,000 to €600,000 all-in: €100,000 to €300,000 for 80 guests, €150,000 to €550,000 for 150, and €250,000 upward at 280.

The three venues sit at three points on that range and they are not interchangeable. Domaine du Mont Leuze hires its evening for €14,000 to €26,000. Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild starts at €100,000 for the hire alone, before a kitchen, a chair or a marquee has arrived.

Magic Day weddings on Cap Ferrat start from €100,000.

Three, and the useful way to hold them in mind is by what they give you besides a view.

A Palace built in 1908 near the tip of the peninsula, in seven hectares of gardens running down to the sea, with three Michelin Keys in the 2026 French selection and a Michelin star at Le Cap. The ceremony goes in the Volupté Gardens under century-old pines and the dinner at Club Dauphin beside the infinity pool on the water.

It seats 200 on the Panoramic Terraces with the whole hotel taken, or 120 at Club Dauphin without it, and it sleeps 155.

Read the full Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat wedding guide for the spaces, the room block and what a wedding there costs.

A pink villa on the narrowest part of the peninsula, built between 1907 and 1912 for Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild, who bought the plot the moment she heard a king wanted it and spent seven years making nine gardens across seven hectares. She left it to the Académie des Beaux-Arts with some 5,000 works of art, and it is a museum that closes its gates rather than a venue that opens them.

The French garden seats 300. The Patio seats 150 and is also the room everybody ends up in if it rains, which makes 150 the number that actually governs a wedding here.

Read the full Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild wedding guide for the gardens, the hire and what a wedding there costs.

A private estate on the hillside above Villefranche-sur-Mer, ten minutes off the peninsula, whose terrace is called the Roof of the World and seats 280 with 500 standing. Three villas, three studios and two suites sleep 38.

It is the only one of the three with an outdoor curfew later than eleven.

Read the full Domaine du Mont Leuze wedding guide for the rate bands, the curfew and what a wedding there costs.

On most of this coast the accommodation problem is a matter of degree. On Cap Ferrat it is the whole decision, because the two peninsula venues are at opposite ends of it.

The Grand-Hôtel sleeps 155 people in 74 rooms and three villas. That is more than any other single venue on the French Riviera, and it means a wedding of 120 can put essentially everybody inside the gates, walk them to dinner and walk them back.

Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild sleeps nobody. It is a museum. There is no kitchen, no bedroom and no bar, and at closing time the staff go home.

Between those two sits Mont Leuze with 38 beds and a hillside.

So the question to settle before looking at photographs is whether this wedding is one that gathers in a building or one that arrives at a garden. Both are good weddings and they cost very different amounts, and the gardens are the more expensive of the two once the marquee, the kitchen, the generator and the hotel block are counted.

The peninsula is two square kilometres hanging south off the corniche between Villefranche and Beaulieu, wooded, steep at the edges and almost entirely occupied by private houses behind gates.

The isthmus is the narrow neck where Villa Ephrussi stands, with water on both sides and the view running west to Villefranche and east to Beaulieu.

The tip is where the Grand-Hôtel sits in its seven hectares, and where the coastal path rounds the point. The path is about eleven kilometres all the way round and is the thing to send guests on with a Friday morning free.

Saint-Jean itself is the village on the eastern side, a working port with restaurants around it, and it is where a guest list that is not staying at the Grand-Hôtel will actually spend its evenings.

The hill behind, off the peninsula at Villefranche, is Mont Leuze. It trades the waterline for a wider view and an extra hour of music.

Not in practice. Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat 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 what the Volupté Gardens and the French garden were photographed for.

Eleven at night outdoors, across the peninsula, under Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat’s own rules. Both venues there work to it.

What differs is what happens at 11pm. At Villa Ephrussi the Patio is enclosed, so the party moves inside and carries on rather than stopping. At the Grand-Hôtel the Volupté Gardens run at moderate volume until eleven and the DJ at Club Dauphin goes until two in the morning.

Ten minutes away at Mont Leuze, in Villefranche, the outdoor hour is midnight, and the first floor of the castle runs until half past two. An hour outdoors is worth more on a warm September night than most things you can buy with the same money, and it is the clearest reason to look off the peninsula.

We get whichever applies written into the contract before signature.

Nice airport is 29 minutes from Villa Ephrussi and 33 from the Grand-Hôtel at the tip, with Mont Leuze at 26. There are very few places on this coast where an international airport is that close to the wedding.

Nice itself is 21 minutes and Monaco 26 to 30. Cannes, at 50 to 54 minutes, is the other coast as far as a guest list is concerned.

Beaulieu-sur-Mer, five minutes off the peninsula, has a railway station on the Nice to Ventimiglia line, which reaches Nice in about ten minutes and Monaco in under ten the other way.

The peninsula has a single road down from the corniche and it narrows as it goes. For 150 guests arriving at once this is a sequencing problem rather than a traffic problem, and it is solved with staggered coaches and a holding point at the top rather than with optimism.

June or September.

Villa Ephrussi’s gardens are in flower from May, the Grand-Hôtel opens in early March and runs into the autumn, and Mont Leuze publishes its rates for May to September. That leaves a season narrower than the weather would suggest.

Late May carries the Monaco Grand Prix, twenty-six minutes away, which fills and reprices every room between Nice and Menton. It is the one date to check before any other on this stretch of coast.

If the wedding is at the Grand-Hôtel, most of the guest list stays in it. A hundred and fifty-five beds behind one gate is the reason to choose the hotel and it removes the transfer problem entirely.

If the wedding is at Villa Ephrussi, none of them do, and the block goes to Beaulieu-sur-Mer at five minutes or Villefranche at ten. Both are on the water, both have a railway station, and between them they hold rooms at considerably more price points than the peninsula does.

Saint-Jean village itself has a handful of smaller hotels, which suit the wedding party rather than the whole list.

Choose between the hotel and the garden first, and do it on beds rather than on photographs.

The Grand-Hôtel is a complete weekend behind one gate with 155 people asleep inside it. Villa Ephrussi is nine gardens, a marquee, a kitchen brought in on a truck and a hotel block five minutes away. We always put that choice first here, because everything downstream of it is different.

The second thing is that the Villa’s real capacity is 150, not 300. The French garden seats 300 and the Patio, which is where everyone goes if it rains, seats half that. On this coast in June the chance of needing it is small and not negligible, and a wedding of 250 at the Villa is a wedding with no wet-weather plan unless a marquee is standing anyway.

The third is the extra hour off the peninsula. Eleven outdoors is the Saint-Jean rule and it is not movable; midnight at Mont Leuze is ten minutes away. For couples whose evening is the point rather than the address, that hour is the cheapest upgrade available on this part of the coast.

Then there is the airport, which nobody thinks to value. Twenty-nine minutes from Nice means guests land at eleven and are at lunch by one, and a Friday arrival does not cost anybody a day. Against Provence at an hour or the Drôme at nearly two, that is worth real money on a guest list of 150.

Magic Day has been established on the French Riviera since 2015.

Magic Day has worked the Alpes-Maritimes from an office in Nice since 2015, and the company has planned weddings in Europe since 2008. Cap Ferrat is twenty minutes down the coast and we work the whole of it, from the tip to the hill above Villefranche, at 80 guests and at 300.

What we do here is the beds question first, then the wet-weather room, then the road. The choice between a hotel that sleeps 155 and a museum that sleeps nobody decides the budget. The Patio’s 150 decides the guest list at the Villa. And one road down to a peninsula decides how 150 people arrive without arriving at once.

Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people are coming, and we will tell you which of the three the guest list has already chosen.