Château Saint Georges wedding

The Domaine Saint Georges sits on the hillside at Magagnosc above Grasse, three hectares of terraced park with palms, cypresses, balustrades and nineteenth-century statuary stepping down the slope. There are two houses on it, a few paces apart, and a wedding takes both.

The château is the larger, fifteen hundred square metres in a Louis XIV manner with gilded panelling, a spa and an indoor pool.

Villa Norah is the other, built at the end of the nineteenth century by an English peer and now a mixture of Art Deco and neo-Provençal, with vaulted ceilings, three reception rooms and gardens of its own around an outdoor pool. The estate’s own account has Queen Victoria staying here on her Provençal holidays, which is the kind of claim a brochure makes and a page should attribute rather than repeat.

The estate is not one space but a series of terraces and two houses, and a wedding uses the ground rather than a room.

Three hectares on terraces, with palm walks, balustrades and statues on every level. The ceremony goes here, and which level depends on the guest count and the light.

Gilded and panelled under chandeliers, in the style the brochure calls Versailles with Provençal colours. They are where the evening goes at ten, when the outdoor music has to stop.

Three reception rooms and gardens of its own. It is lighter than the château and a century later, which gives a second set of interiors without leaving the estate.

An indoor pool and spa at the château and an outdoor one at the villa, which between them make the day before and the day after as usable as the wedding itself.

A Château Saint Georges wedding starts from €120,000 and lands near €200,000 all-in for 60 to 120 guests.

Both houses, the park and all twenty bedrooms, priced by season, by length and by guest band. From May to September, two midweek nights are €25,000 up to 40 guests, €29,000 to 80 and €31,000 to 120. A Friday-to-Sunday weekend is €29,000, €33,000 and €35,000, and Thursday to Sunday €35,000, €39,000 and €41,000. From October to April the weekend drops to the summer midweek figures and a single weekday night starts at €19,000.

Every number on that card is a round thousand, which after a season of rate sheets is a small mercy.

The bathroom attendants, the after-event cleaning, the venue manager and the security agents with their minibuses, all of it on the wedding day only. An extra night is €6,000 in season and €4,000 out of it, and an extra day with the estate from eight until eight is €4,000, or €5,000 in July and August.

Breakfast for the forty residents at €1,000 a day, daily housekeeping across both houses at €2,000, a pre-wedding dinner from €1,000 up to €4,000 by the same guest bands, and a brunch the next day from €4,000 to €6,000 with the estate held until five.

The catering and its staff; the tent, which is the client’s to organise and to certify; the furniture beyond what the two houses hold for forty residents; the flowers, the music and the photography; and the shuttles, which are not optional.

Twenty bedrooms sleeping forty across the two houses: seven bedrooms and six bathrooms in the château for fourteen people, and thirteen double bedrooms with eleven en-suite bathrooms in Villa Norah for twenty-six.

Both houses are in the hire, so the estate belongs to the wedding for the whole stay rather than the evening.

Forty beds against a ceiling of 120 guests is a better ratio than almost anything on this coast, and it changes what the weekend is. At sixty guests most of the party is on site and the wedding becomes a three-day house party instead of a dinner people drive to. We always take the three-night Thursday option when the guest list is under eighty, because the extra night costs €6,000 and buys the whole shape of the weekend.

The estate is on the avenue Francis de Croisset at Magagnosc, on the hillside east of Grasse, with the perfume town below it and the Mediterranean beyond.

Grasse is seven minutes, Cannes 27, Antibes 34 and Nice 47. Nice airport is 39 and Monaco 63.

This needs saying before anything else. No car is allowed up to the château on an event day. Fifty spaces exist at the entrance of the property, parking on the roads around it is forbidden, and the largest vehicle that can climb to the house is a twenty-seat minibus. Above fifty cars, shuttles are a condition of the hire rather than a suggestion.

The arrival is the plan here and it should be costed first. A hundred and twenty guests, fifty parking spaces at the gate, no cars beyond them and twenty-seat minibuses as the only thing that can climb means a shuttle operation running in both directions all evening. We always build the schedule backwards from the last minibus rather than from the first course, and we treat the transport as a line of the budget rather than a detail of it.

The ten o’clock hour is the second thing, and it is earlier than the coast.

Most of the Alpes-Maritimes works to eleven. Here the outdoor music stops at ten and everything after that happens indoors with the doors and windows shut. That is a real constraint on a wedding built around a garden, and it is also why the two houses matter: between the château’s salons and Villa Norah’s three reception rooms there is somewhere good for the party to go, which is not true of every estate that closes its garden early.

The third is the ratio of beds to guests, and it is the reason to choose this place. Forty people sleeping on the estate at a wedding of sixty is a proportion nothing on the coast matches at this price, and it turns a Friday arrival and a Sunday brunch into the point of the weekend rather than the edges of it.

Magic Day plans weddings at Château Saint Georges from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the dates and which of the six rates they fall under, the symbolic ceremony on the terraces and the mairie paperwork behind it, the caterer and the kitchen they will be working from, the tent and its safety file, the twenty bedrooms across two houses, the shuttle plan up the hill, and the move indoors at ten.

We have worked the Alpes-Maritimes for years, with an office in Nice. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people, and we will tell you what the estate comes to and how many minibuses the evening needs.