Domaine de Capelongue wedding

Capelongue stands on the hillside opposite Bonnieux, in the Petit Luberon, five hectares of terraces planted with lavender, cypress and olives. The buildings are farm buildings with pastel shutters, linked by stone paths, and the village sits on its own hill across the valley in full view of most of them.

It belongs to Beaumier, which runs it as a hotel of 57 rooms rather than an estate that can be rented.

That distinction is the whole of how a wedding works here. There is no venue hire, no event space on a rate card and no evening rate. There is a hotel, and a wedding takes all of it.

The estate is gardens and restaurants rather than reception rooms, and the hotel is direct about which parts do what.

Where the ceremony goes, and the hotel’s own first choice: lavender and olive terraces with Bonnieux behind. Refreshments during the ceremony are charged per head.

Where the banquet happens, a three-course dinner under a structure that is hired rather than provided. A tent with a wooden floor is also the required wet-weather answer for any outdoor dinner.

The hotel’s dining room, which holds one Michelin star in the 2026 selection. It is where the menu tasting happens and where a smaller wedding eats.

The second restaurant, a long family-style room with a view of Bonnieux. It takes the welcome dinner and the brunch.

Two outdoor pools, an outdoor jacuzzi, a spa and an outdoor cinema, all of which come with the privatisation and all of which matter on a three-day wedding more than they would on a one-day one.

A Domaine de Capelongue wedding starts from €350,000 and lands near €500,000 all-in for 80 to 150 guests.

About €65,000 a night, breakfast for every guest included, with a minimum of two nights. A brunch on the following day requires a third. The figure moves with the dates, and the hotel quotes it rather than publishing it.

The hotel does its own catering and asks for a minimum spend in the restaurant for each day of the privatisation, between €15,000 and €40,000. Two nights therefore start at roughly €160,000 before anything has been hired or decorated, which is the number to put in front of a couple at the first meeting.

Equipment, of any kind. There are no tables, no chairs, no tableware, no linen and no marquee, though the hotel says plainly that this is why it requires a planner. On a 150-guest wedding that is a full production build on a hotel lawn.

The menu tasting is free for two and €60 a head for anyone else; ceremony refreshments are €8 a head; and a wedding of about thirty is handled as a group booking rather than a privatisation, which is a different order of cost.

Fifty-seven rooms and suites between 20 and 102 square metres, sleeping 130 people of whom 120 are adults. The wedding suite is the Signature, the estate’s former dovecote, three storeys standing on its own with a private terrace and a view round the whole valley.

A hundred and thirty beds against a ceiling of 150 guests is the rarest thing about this hotel.

Nowhere else in the Luberon sleeps a whole wedding, and it changes what the two nights are for: nobody drives, nobody leaves at midnight, and the breakfast the morning after is the wedding continuing rather than a coda. Beyond 130 there are two Beaumier sister hotels nearby, at Lourmarin, adding a hundred more beds, and the group will privatise all three together.

The hotel is on the chemin des Cabanes at Bonnieux, in the Vaucluse, on the northern slope of the Petit Luberon.

Gordes is 21 minutes, Aix-en-Provence 49 and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence 56. Marseille is an hour and fifteen and Nice two and a half hours.

Marseille airport is an hour and twelve and Avignon 57 minutes. Avignon TGV is 59 minutes and Aix-en-Provence TGV 58, and the hotel arranges transfers from any of them. For a guest list coming from London or Paris the train is the shorter door-to-door journey.

The arithmetic is the first conversation and there is no gentle version of it. Two nights of privatisation at about €65,000 each, plus a kitchen floor of at least €15,000 a day, is roughly €160,000 before a single chair has been hired. We always put that figure in front of a couple at the first meeting rather than the fourth, because it is the number that decides whether this hotel is the right one, and half of the couples who ask about it are describing a different wedding.

What the money buys is the thing nobody else in the Luberon has.

A hundred and thirty beds at a wedding of 150 means the whole party sleeps where it ate. There are no coaches, no taxis down a hill road at two in the morning and no guests missing the brunch because they are checking out of somewhere else. On a two-night wedding that is not a convenience, it is the structure of the event.

The third thing is that the hotel provides no equipment at all, which reads oddly next to the price until you understand the model. Beaumier sells rooms and food, and everything a wedding sits on, eats off or shelters under comes from outside. That is why a planner is a condition of the booking here and why the production line of the budget is larger than at a château charging a tenth as much for its ground.

Magic Day plans weddings at Domaine de Capelongue from the first conversation to the final farewell. The hotel requires a planner and states why: it has 57 rooms and a starred kitchen, and not one table or chair.

That means the dates and the nights the privatisation needs, the kitchen minimum and what it should actually be spent on, the symbolic ceremony in the gardens and the mairie paperwork behind it, the full furniture and marquee build with its wooden floor, the room allocation across 57 keys, the move indoors at eleven, and the sister hotels at Lourmarin if the guest list runs past 130.

We have worked across Provence for years, and the Luberon is the part of it that stays cool in August. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people, and we will tell you what two nights of this hotel actually comes to.