Château Eza wedding

Château Eza is built into the rock at the top of Èze, the medieval village that sits on a cone of limestone four hundred metres above the sea between Nice and Monaco. The houses were once a group of dwellings belonging to the Prince of Sweden, and they have been joined into a hotel of fourteen rooms without being flattened into one: the floors still step and the passages still turn.

What the village has, and almost nowhere else on this coast does, is height directly over water.

The terrace hangs off the cliff with nothing between it and the sea. From it you look down on Cap Ferrat, along the coast to Italy, and at aircraft turning into Nice below you. The restaurant behind it holds one Michelin star in the 2026 selection, and it is the reason the dinner here is a fixed price rather than a catering brief.

There are two spaces and the hotel uses both in one evening, which is the whole of the arrangement.

Where the ceremony happens, given over to the wedding as part of the dinner privatisation. It is cut into the cliff, it is narrow, and it is the view everybody has come for.

Thirty-eight seats, glass on the sea side, and the room the wedding is actually sized by. Laid as one long table outdoors it takes 26.

Panelled sitting rooms with fireplaces, a wine cellar cut into the rock, and fourteen bedrooms above. They matter to a wedding here more than they would anywhere else, because taking them is what buys the hours.

A Château Eza wedding starts from €100,000 and lands near €200,000 all-in for 20 to 38 guests.

A flat €13,000 privatises the restaurant for up to 38 guests, and the hotel asks for no minimum consumption on top of it, because the figure is already fixed. It covers the terrace for the ceremony, an hour of open bar with champagne, hot and cold appetisers, a five-course menu from a starred kitchen and a beverage package of half a bottle of wine, water and coffee.

Separate, and the thing that changes the evening. All fourteen rooms are just over €14,000 a night taken for two nights or more, and just over €18,000 for a single night, with breakfasts in both. It is the only way the music runs past half past ten.

The flowers, the music, the photography, the transfers up to the village and the extra nights for a guest list larger than twenty-eight. There is very little production to buy here, because there is nowhere to put it.

Fourteen rooms and suites sleeping twenty-eight: two standard rooms without a view, two with a double bathtub, two superior and three deluxe with balconies and part of the sea, two junior suites and two suites looking straight at the water, and a presidential suite with its own terrace and plunge pool.

At a wedding of 38 that houses nearly the whole guest list, which is a thing no other venue on this coast can say.

It is also the reason the buyout is worth modelling early rather than late. Two nights for fourteen rooms is a real figure, but it replaces a hotel block, a transfer plan and an eleven o’clock finish all at once. We always price the wedding both ways before a date is held, because the answer is not the same for every guest list.

The hotel is at the top of Èze village, in the Alpes-Maritimes, on the Moyenne Corniche between Nice and Monaco.

Monaco is 13 minutes and Nice 18. Nice airport is 29, Antibes 44, Cannes 49 and Grasse 57, so this is the eastern end of the coast and the western half is a real drive.

Èze village is closed to traffic. Cars stop below and the last stretch is a climb through the lanes, which the hotel handles for guests and their luggage but which should be said out loud to anybody who is not steady on their feet.

The curfew is the first decision and everything else follows from it. Without the buyout the music stops at half past ten and the guests are asked to leave at eleven, which on a wedding day is early enough to change what the day should be. With all fourteen rooms taken it runs to one. We always put that question first, because it decides whether this is a dinner with a view or a wedding.

The second thing is the number, and it is not negotiable.

Thirty-eight seats is the smallest ceiling of any venue we work with, and the hotel holds it. What it buys is a kind of wedding the large properties cannot do: one table, one room, a starred kitchen cooking a five-course menu, and a terrace on a cliff for the ceremony. Below thirty guests it is close to unbeatable on this coast. Above forty it is simply not the venue.

The last thing is the village itself. Èze takes coaches of day visitors all summer and the lanes are narrow and stepped, so the arrival needs planning in a way a château drive does not. A September wedding gets the same terrace with a quarter of the traffic, which is worth more here than the weather is.

Magic Day plans weddings at Château Eza from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the date and whether the hotel is taken whole, the symbolic ceremony on the terrace and the mairie paperwork behind it, the menu with the kitchen, the flowers on a terrace that will not take much of them, the arrival into a village that cars cannot enter, and the rooms for twenty-eight.

We have worked the Alpes-Maritimes for years, with an office in Nice. Tell us how many people you are thinking of, and we will tell you straight away whether this is the right hotel or the wrong one.