Château de Chantilly wedding

Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France, built the Petit Château in the 1550s to Jean Bullant’s designs. The estate passed to the Condés in the next century, and the Grand Condé had André Le Nôtre lay out its park, with the Grand Canal dug in the early 1670s.

In April 1671 Louis XIV came to stay, and Vatel, the prince’s maître d’hôtel, ran the feast from the vaulted kitchens that now hold the restaurant La Capitainerie. The Grandes Écuries, which Jean Aubert built for Louis-Henri de Bourbon-Condé between 1719 and 1740, are the largest princely stables in Europe.

The Grand Château was pulled down after the Revolution, in 1799 and 1800. Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale, son of King Louis-Philippe, rebuilt it between 1876 and 1882 to Honoré Daumet’s plans, to hold his collections, and in 1886 left the whole estate to the Institut de France.

His paintings, hung as he left them, make the Musée Condé the second collection of old masters in France after the Louvre, and the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry is among its manuscripts.

Its films run from A View to a Kill in 1985 to The Gray Man in 2021.

The Domaine hires the château’s rooms and the park’s spaces one by one for the evening, so a wedding is built room by room: inside the château for up to 160, or outside under a marquee for any number.

The Condés’ reception gallery, designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and hung with the Grand Condé’s battles, for the ceremony and the cocktail, for up to 100.

The picture gallery of the Musée Condé, hung frame to frame with some eighty-five paintings, Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents among them, down to the rotunda at its end: a dinner of up to 160 among the old masters.

Forty-four stained-glass windows in grisaille tell the story of Psyche, over a dinner of 72 at one long table.

The courtyard at the heart of the château, and the aviary garden below it with its embroideries of box and its busts of Roman emperors, each take 500 for the cocktail.

The restaurant under the vaults of Vatel’s kitchens, and the place for the dancing, since there is none upstairs.

A seventeenth-century house in the park that keeps the memory of the Duchesse de Montmorency, the Sylvie of Théophile de Viau’s poems. Its Rotonde takes a dinner of 80, its salons the dancing, and its French garden the ceremony and a cocktail of 220.

The real-tennis court Louis-Joseph de Condé built in 1756, one of the few left with its fittings intact, for a dinner of 200 in the park.

An island in the park, ringed with fountains and hedges around a statue of Eros, for a ceremony of 150.

The terrace over Le Nôtre’s parterre, 7,500 square metres with the château on one side and the garden on the other: the site for a marquee or a glass pavilion of any size, with fireworks over the parterre.

The château has no bedrooms, and it cannot put up a single guest.

The Auberge du Jeu de Paume, a hotel of 92 rooms with a Michelin Key, stands on the estate, a short walk from the château, and it takes the couple and the families. The Domaine counts 1,530 rooms in four- and five-star hotels nearby for the rest of the wedding, and we run the shuttles between them.

The château stands on its estate at the edge of the town of Chantilly, in the Oise, under an hour north of Paris by road on a clear run. Senlis is a quarter of an hour away and the abbey of Royaumont twenty minutes.

Paris Charles de Gaulle is half an hour away by road, closer than Paris itself. Orly is an hour, and Le Bourget, for private aircraft, three quarters of an hour.

Chantilly-Gouvieux, five minutes from the château, is 25 minutes from Paris Gare du Nord by train.

The Domaine hires its rooms one by one, and its 2026 rates cover the space, its supervision and the power: the Galerie de Peinture, for the dinner, is just over €19,000 with VAT from six in the evening to two in the morning. A marquee on the Terrasse d’Enghien is hired by the day, for the days of the build as well as the evening.

• The room, from six in the evening to two in the morning, with the set-up and the dismantling inside those hours
• Its supervision by the Domaine’s staff
• The electricity

Everything else comes in: the caterer, from the Domaine’s list or beyond it, the furniture, the design, the flowers, the lighting, the music, the entertainment and the waste, and for a marquee the structure and its floor. Each hour beyond two is charged.

A Magic Day wedding at Château de Chantilly starts from €200,000 inside the château and lands near €300,000. Under a marquee or a glass pavilion on the terrace it starts from €500,000 and lands near €750,000.

Choose the format first. Inside, the château seats 160 in the Galerie de Peinture; outside, a marquee on the Terrasse d’Enghien seats as many as the wedding needs. We decide between them before anything else, because they are different budgets and different builds.

Plan where to dance. There is no dancing in the château. We schedule the dinner among the paintings and the party at La Capitainerie or the Maison de Sylvie, with the way between them lit.

Use the airport. Charles de Gaulle is half an hour away, closer than Paris. We put the guests who fly in straight into the hotels around the estate, and bring the Paris guests up by train or coach.

Face the marquee to the château. The Terrasse d’Enghien looks along Le Nôtre’s parterre to the château. We design the structure so the dinner faces it, and time the fireworks over the parterre.

Château de Chantilly gives a wedding the Condés’ château and the duc d’Aumale’s paintings, a park by Le Nôtre and a terrace for a marquee, under an hour from Paris. What it leaves to the couple is everything else: the caterer, the furniture, the design, the music, a place to dance, and the rooms for every guest.

That is a planner’s work, and at a château hired room by room, putting the rooms together is most of it.

Magic Day plans weddings at Château de Chantilly from the first conversation to the final farewell.