Domaine de Fontenille wedding

The bastide was built between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, in the Aix style, as the stronghold of the Savornin family. It stands at the foot of the Petit Luberon above Lauris, with its own vineyard and olive grove around it and a park of cedars and plane trees in front.

The cedars are the thing you remember.

It was restored in 2015 and runs now as a hotel designed to feel like a family house, the founding property of what has since become the Fontenille Collection. Lourmarin is a few minutes away and the Durance valley is below, with Montagne Sainte-Victoire on the southern horizon from the upper terraces.

The estate is bought out whole for a minimum of two nights, and the shape of the wedding is largely set by which of its outdoor rooms you use when.

Cedars and plane trees, and the ceremony setting at the far end of it with the vines and the Petit Luberon behind.

Where the cocktail hour goes, looking down the Durance valley towards Sainte-Victoire.

Where the wedding dinner goes, and where the brunch happens the following morning under the plane trees.

The dancing, with direct access onto the patio, and the room the four o’clock curfew belongs to.

Where the welcome dinner or barbecue on the eve of the wedding usually happens, alongside the terrace of the estate’s restaurant.

Tastings of the estate’s own cuvées, a guided walk through the vines and the vegetable garden, and a cellar that takes a cocktail reception.

A Domaine de Fontenille wedding starts from €250,000 and lands near €350,000 all-in for 60 to 120 guests.

Two nights minimum, and the rate covers every room in the house with breakfast and the event fee. The property brochure gives a floor of €30,000 a night. For the dates couples actually ask about, which at this estate means April to June and September to October, the quoted range is €35,000 to €45,000 a night. Two nights in the middle of that is €80,000.

Separate from the buyout and set by the date: between €27,000 and €45,000 across the whole event. Catering is provided by the estate and outside caterers are not used, so this is a floor rather than an estimate.

Every wedding of more than sixty guests needs a nomad or stretch tent, for the simple reason that the indoor spaces hold sixty and a hundred and twenty people caught in a storm need somewhere to be. On a wedding of a hundred this is a five-figure line and it is the item most often missing from a first budget.

The decoration, the flowers, the photography, the music and the transfers, all of which the estate is happy for you to bring from outside. Furniture beyond what the estate holds, and the rooms for the seventy guests who do not sleep on site.

A tasting of the wedding menu for two is complimentary. So are breakfasts and an experience for two on the honeymoon at any Fontenille house, and the same again on each of the first five wedding anniversaries. Pre- and post-wedding room bookings for you and your guests are discounted, and early check-in and late check-out are included.

Ten thirty outdoors, four in the morning indoors. The estate states both in writing, which is rarer than it should be, and the gap between them is the largest of any venue we work with in the Luberon.

The Vaucluse rule is what sets the earlier hour: amplified music outdoors needs an exception from the mairie, so the speakers come in at half past ten. The function room takes the party from there and it has direct access onto the patio, which means guests can step outside for air without the music going with them.

For a guest list that wants to dance until three, this is one of the two or three estates in the Luberon where that is a contractual reality rather than an optimistic assumption.

Twenty-five rooms and suites sleeping fifty, from 25 to 75 square metres, most of them opening onto the cedars and the Luberon hills, several with their own terrace. The buyout includes all of them with breakfast.

Fifty beds against a reception for 120 is the limitation here.

Lourmarin is ten minutes and Cadenet and Cucuron a little further, and the Luberon villages between them hold a reasonable spread of rooms. Aix-en- Provence at 41 minutes is the fallback for a large block, and it is the town most international guests will want a night in anyway.

Privatisation runs until three in the afternoon on the departure day, which buys a proper brunch rather than a rushed one.

The estate is on the route de Roquefraiche at Lauris, in the Vaucluse, in the Luberon regional park on the north bank of the Durance.

Lourmarin is 10 minutes, Cadenet 8, Aix-en-Provence 41 and Avignon an hour and one. Marseille is an hour and seven.

Marseille airport is an hour. Aix-en-Provence is 41 minutes by road and Aix TGV a similar distance, and Avignon TGV is an hour and three. Of the Luberon estates this is the one that leans towards Aix rather than Avignon, which suits a guest list flying into Marseille.

The tent is the number to get right first. Sixty is the indoor capacity and a hundred and twenty is the reception capacity, and the gap between them is a stretch tent that has to be hired, delivered, built and struck, and that has to be standing whether it rains or not. On a wedding of a hundred it is a five-figure line that belongs in the first budget rather than the fourth, and couples who discover it late discover it after the buyout is signed.

The second thing is the two minimums working together. Eighty thousand for two nights plus a catering floor of thirty-odd thousand means the estate has taken about €115,000 before a flower is ordered. That is a high fixed base, and it is why this venue works at a hundred and twenty guests and stops making sense at sixty. A small wedding here pays the same floor as a large one, and we never recommend Fontenille below about eighty guests for that reason, though the estate itself will take them.

The third is the four o’clock curfew, which is genuinely unusual and is the reason couples choose Fontenille over prettier estates nearby. It is written down, it is indoors, and the function room opens onto a patio, so the last four hours of the night have somewhere to happen that is neither a marquee nor a car park.

Then there is the three o’clock departure. Most estates want the rooms back by eleven, which turns the brunch into a queue by the luggage. Four extra hours changes the last morning entirely, and it is worth more to the feel of a weekend than most line items twice its size.

Magic Day plans weddings at Domaine de Fontenille from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the date and which end of the buyout range it sits at, the catering minimum and how to spend it well, the tent and everything that goes under it, the 25 rooms and the block in Lourmarin or Aix, the ten thirty and four o’clock curfews written into the contract, and the symbolic ceremony among the cedars with the mairie paperwork behind it.

We have worked across Provence for years, and the Luberon is where couples who have already seen the Alpilles usually end up. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people, and we will tell you what the two nights come to.