Domaine de Canaille wedding

The Domaine sits on sixty private hectares under Cap Canaille, the highest sea cliff in France, inside the Calanques national park and fifteen minutes on foot from the harbour of Cassis. The house was built in 1840 and spent most of the twentieth century as the Hôtel du Revestel, which took Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill in their turn.

The present owners bought it and rebuilt it in 2017, and it is a private house again rather than a hotel.

Six hundred square metres of it, with three sitting rooms and an open kitchen facing the Mediterranean, and outside a terrace of four hundred square metres above the Plage de l’Arène with a private path down to the water in under five minutes. Sixty hectares inside a national park means nothing is visible from it that the estate does not own.

The wedding is outdoors from start to finish unless a marquee is hired, and the estate is a sequence of terraces rather than a lawn.

One of the two ceremony settings, running under the trees at the entrance to the estate.

The other. Each looks out over the water at a different height, and which one is used depends on the guest list and on the wind, which off Cap Canaille is a real variable.

Five hundred square metres of terracing between them, where the cocktail hour goes and where the dance floor is laid in front of the dining room.

The other two dinner settings, taken when the number suits them better than the main terrace. Both are held to acoustic or background music.

Three sitting rooms, an open kitchen and a staircase the house was clearly built around, all of it looking at the sea. There is a sauna, a hammam and, in the basement, a nightclub.

A Domaine de Canaille wedding starts from €250,000 and lands near €350,000 all-in for 60 to 110 guests.

Between €50,000 and €120,000 for the four-night minimum, set by the season, the length, the guest list and how many events you hold. The estate’s own examples are the clearest guide: €50,000 for thirty or forty guests over four nights from October to mid-May with the wedding and a brunch; €80,000 for seventy in the shoulder weeks on the same shape; and €100,000 for a hundred and ten in high season over four to seven nights with a rehearsal dinner, the reception and a brunch.

Fifty per cent falls due at signature and the rest three months before.

More than most private estates: the caretaker present through the wedding, six hours of daily cleaning, continental breakfast for the residents, the final clean, twenty parking spaces, a heated pool and hot tub, a pétanque court, the sound system indoors, and furniture and tableware for forty guests inside and out with ten catering tables.

The catering, the sound and lighting, and any furniture, decoration or flowers beyond the forty covers. The pack states that exclusion against every one of its three examples, and it is the reason a €100,000 hire becomes a €350,000 wedding.

A member of staff to manage the lavatories and keep guests out of the house, a safety officer trained in first aid and firefighting above seventy guests, extra lavatories above eighty, and a planner, whom the estate asks for in writing to work alongside its own team.

Twelve bedrooms sleeping twenty-six, nine in the main house and three in the annex, and up to twenty-eight with extra beds. Ten can be made up as twins. The master bedroom is sixty square metres on the top floor, with a study, two showers and a bath that looks at the sea.

All but two of the annex rooms are air-conditioned, and every one has its own bathroom.

Twenty-six beds against a wedding of a hundred and ten is the limitation, and Cassis answers it better than most towns could. The harbour is fifteen minutes on foot and five by car, the station is seven, and there is a five-star hotel on the next headland with forty-five rooms looking back at the Domaine. We always place the two families on the estate and build the block in the town, because a guest who can walk home from dinner does not need a coach.

The estate is on the avenue du Revestel at Cassis, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, on the seaward side of Cap Canaille inside the Calanques national park.

Cassis station is 7 minutes, Marseille 33 and Aix-en-Provence 42. Marseille Saint-Charles is 35 minutes, which makes the TGV the sensible arrival.

Marseille is 57 minutes, about ten more than the brochure’s figure. Toulon-Hyères is 54 and Nice over two hours, so this is a Marseille wedding whatever the sea outside suggests.

Twenty spaces, and the estate recommends vans rather than cars. On a private road under a cliff inside a national park that is not a number that can be negotiated upwards, so the arrival is a shuttle from Cassis.

Four weddings a year is the first thing and it decides everything else. The estate caps itself there, the minimum stay is four nights, and between them the number of usable dates in a season is very small. A couple who wants this place should hold a date before they have decided anything else, and we say so at the first conversation rather than the third.

The second thing is where the money actually is.

A hire of €100,000 reads like most of a wedding until you notice that catering, decoration, sound and lighting are outside every single one of the estate’s figures. What the hire buys is four nights of a private headland with a caretaker, a cleaner and tableware for forty. Everything a hundred and ten people eat, sit on and dance to arrives separately, which is why the all-in number is three times the rental and why we model both from the start.

The last thing is the curfew, or rather the music map, which is more specific than any contract we hold in Provence. Loudspeakers are allowed indoors or at one marked place on the main terrace pointing at the sea and the mountain, and nowhere else. Acoustic or background only at the pool and in the alley, and no pool party with a DJ at any hour. Within those lines the night runs to two, which is generous; outside them there is no negotiation, so the design has to start from the map rather than arrive at it.

Magic Day plans weddings at Domaine de Canaille from the first conversation to the final farewell. The estate asks for a planner in writing, and the reason is in the list above: four nights, three or four events, a hundred and ten guests, twenty parking spaces and a house that has to be kept out of.

That means the date and which of the four a year it is, the four-night shape and what happens on each of them, the symbolic ceremony on the terrace or in the pine alley and the mairie paperwork behind it, the caterer and the kitchen they will build, the sound design written to the estate’s own map, the twelve bedrooms and the block in Cassis, and the shuttles up from the town.

We have worked across Provence and the Marseille coast for years. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people, and we will tell you which of the four weekends is still free and what the week comes to.