Château les Crostes wedding

Les Crostes stands on a rise above Lorgues in the Var interior, at the middle of two hundred hectares of which fifty-five are vines. The house is seventeenth-century and family-owned, ochre with a tower at each end, and there is nothing else in sight from it.

Around the vines are forest, olive groves, gardens and a lake covered in water lilies.

The scale is the argument. Two hundred hectares means the nearest neighbour is not a consideration, and the estate’s answer to the question every venue in Provence is asked, which is what time the music stops, is that there are no restrictions at all.

The estate is hired dry, so what it offers is ground and rooms rather than a set of dressed spaces.

Large, and the natural place for the cocktail and the dinner when the weather holds, which in the Var it usually does between May and September.

Where a reception tent goes for anything above 80 guests, rented from an outside supplier. This is the estate’s own wet-weather answer and it is worth deciding on early rather than in June.

Gardens, lawns, olive groves and a lily-covered lake, which is where most couples put the ceremony because it is the one part of the estate that looks like nothing else nearby.

One of two large sitting rooms inside the château’s 1,080 square metres of indoor space. Under 80 guests a seated dinner fits here if it rains. Over that, it does not.

A pool, a tennis court renovated in 2022, a sauna, a gym, a billiard room, a piano, pétanque and a greenhouse of herbs and succulents. There is also a helicopter landing pad.

A Château les Crostes wedding starts from €150,000 and lands near €250,000 all-in for 80 to 150 guests.

Priced by the season and by the number of nights, with all twelve rooms in every figure. From October to April two nights are €14,000 and a week €30,000, and in May two nights are €20,000.

June and July require three nights and start at €25,000. August is €26,000 for three nights and just under €43,000 for a full week, and September sits between the two at €21,000.

Check-in is at three. A two-night stay checks out at five the following evening, which gives a full day after the wedding rather than a morning.

Everything and nothing. You get the whole estate to yourselves, indoors and out, and twelve rooms made up with bed and bath linen. You do not get wedding coordination, catering, breakfast, housekeeping or a single table or chair.

Nothing is prescribed either. There are no packages and no required suppliers, only a recommended list if you want one, and the estate charges no corkage while selling its own wine at a preferential rate.

The caterer and the kitchen they will bring, the furniture, the tent above 80 guests, the staff for the whole stay, the flowers, the music, the photography and the transfers.

Twelve rooms and suites sleeping 28: a garden room of 26 square metres accessible to guests with reduced mobility, three classic rooms, two superior rooms, two family suites taking four apiece, three classic suites of 45 square metres and the Syrah Suite at 75. All have air conditioning, a safe and a fridge you stock yourself.

Twenty-eight beds against a wedding of 150 is the limitation, and the distances make it sharper than the number suggests.

Lorgues is fifteen minutes away with a good supply of guesthouses, but this is the Var interior and there is no town of any size closer. We always build the hotel block before the date is signed here, not after, because a hundred guests staying fifteen minutes down a dark country road is a transport plan rather than an afterthought.

The estate is on the chemin de Saint-Louis outside Lorgues, in the Var, in the wooded country between Draguignan and the coast.

Lorgues is 15 minutes and Saint-Tropez an hour. Aix is an hour and eighteen, Marseille an hour and thirty-eight, and Cassis an hour and thirty-two.

Nice is an hour and sixteen, Toulon-Hyères an hour and three, and Marseille an hour and thirty-nine. Nice is the one to build a guest list around because of the flights rather than the distance. There is a helicopter pad on the estate for anyone who would rather not drive it.

No curfew is the headline and it is real. The Var’s order measures noise at a neighbour’s property instead of naming an hour, and on two hundred hectares there is no property to measure at, so the estate says in writing that playing hours are unrestricted. Only one other venue we work with in Provence can say that. We always get it into the contract anyway, because a sentence in an email is not a clause.

The second thing is what dry hire actually costs, and it is the number that surprises people.

Fourteen thousand euros for two nights in a seventeenth-century château with twelve bedrooms reads like a bargain, and then you notice there is no kitchen brigade, no furniture, no housekeeping and no breakfast. Everything that happens on this estate arrives on a lorry and leaves on one, including the tables. The hire is a small share of the budget here and the production is a large one, which is the opposite of how a hotel prices.

The third is the tent. There is no indoor event hall, and the Grand Salon takes a seated dinner only below 80 guests. Above that the wet-weather answer is a structure on the lawn, rented from outside and standing for the length of the stay. We price it from the first conversation rather than treating it as insurance, because in this part of Provence it is also the shade.

Magic Day plans weddings at Château les Crostes from the first conversation to the final farewell. Dry hire means the whole of the wedding is ours to build: the dates and the season band, the caterer and the kitchen they need, the tent and the furniture, the symbolic ceremony by the lake and the mairie paperwork behind it, the twelve rooms and the block in Lorgues, and the transport in and out of a valley with no streetlights.

We have worked across Provence and the Var for years. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people, and we will tell you what the estate costs and what has to be brought to it.