Château de la Croix des Gardes wedding

Château de la Croix des Gardes was built in 1919 for the Swiss industrialist Paul Girod, in the Medici style, with Italianate gardens falling away down the hill towards the Bay of Cannes. In 1960 Gustave Leven, who owned Perrier, bought it and had the architects Alan Gore and Andreï Svetchine redesign the façade in the Palladian style and build the pool.

It appears in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, in 1955.

Today it is a private estate of ten hectares, the only château looking over the Bay of Cannes, with the Lérins Islands and the Esterel massif across the water. It takes no more than four weddings a year.

The château hires its gardens for a wedding rather than its rooms: six consecutive days of sole use, for one event. That gives the production time to build, the wedding its evening, and the take-down its days after.

Ten hectares of terraces, lawns and formal gardens, with walks of cypress, fountains, urns and statues, a rock garden, and the bay beyond the balustrades. By the château’s own figure they take an event of up to 2,000; for a wedding, up to 300 is the size we plan them for.

The long pool sits on a terrace above its own pavilion, with the house behind it and the sea in front, and it is where the cocktail belongs at sunset.

The hire is for the gardens, so the dinner goes into a structure built for the wedding and sized to the guest list. The six days are there to put it up and take it down again, with the wedding in between.

Inside the house, the great room takes 160 for drinks or 80 seated, with the house taken for the stay.

Seventeen bedrooms, for 34 guests, in a house of nearly four thousand square metres. The château offers the stay on a quote of its own, separate from the hire of the gardens.

We give the house to the couple and the families.

The house cannot sleep a wedding of this size, so the rest of the guests stay in Cannes, eight minutes down the hill, and come up to the wedding by car.

The château stands on the boulevard Leader, on the Croix des Gardes hill in the west of Cannes, above the bay. The Croisette and the station are under ten minutes away, Mougins thirteen, Antibes twenty-five and Monaco under an hour, on a clear road.

Nice Côte d’Azur is the airport, 40 minutes by road, with direct flights from the United States and the United Kingdom. Cannes-Mandelieu, twelve minutes away, takes light private jets.

Cannes station, seven minutes away, is on the TGV line from Paris.

The château hires its gardens, not a menu or a package: six consecutive days of sole use, for one event, for over €900,000 with VAT. The replacement of the lawns after the wedding is charged on top.

The house for the stay is quoted on its own. The structure for the dinner, the catering, the design, the flowers, the lighting, the sound, the security and the transfers all come from the château’s accredited partners, on a list it shares once the project is validated.

A Magic Day wedding at Château de la Croix des Gardes starts at €1,300,000 and lands near €1,500,000.

Four weddings a year means the date comes first. The château takes no more than four, so a date is held before anything is designed. We ask for it as soon as the couple has a season in mind.

Six days is the production schedule. The hire runs six consecutive days for one event, and we schedule the build of the structure over the first days, the wedding in the middle and the take-down after, so nothing is compressed into the morning of the wedding.

The partners are the château’s. It works only with its accredited network, from the caterers and the event producers to the security, and shares the list once the project is validated. We build the team from it rather than around it.

Agree the music at the contract. The château discusses the music and its hours with each wedding, so we settle them before signing rather than in the week of the wedding.

Budget the lawns. The replacement of the lawns after the event is charged on top of the hire, and a structure for a large dinner stands on them for days. We put it in the first budget.

Château de la Croix des Gardes gives a wedding ten hectares of gardens over the Bay of Cannes for six days, and a house of seventeen bedrooms for those closest. What it leaves to the couple is everything built on those gardens: the structure, the kitchen, the design, the light, the music and the guests’ way up from Cannes.

That is a planner’s work, and on an estate hired as its gardens alone, the production is most of it.

Magic Day plans weddings at Château de la Croix des Gardes from the first conversation to the final farewell.