La Bastide de Laurence wedding

The house is four hundred years old, twelve thousand square feet, and approached up a drive lined with cypresses and lavender. It stands a few minutes outside L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, the antiques town known for its canals and its Sunday market, with fruit orchards on one side and the hills in the distance.

The plane trees over the lawn are the feature everybody photographs.

It reopened recently after a long restoration and it is run as a private house that takes a small number of events rather than as a wedding venue that also sleeps people. That distinction sets everything else on this page: there is no ballroom, no banqueting team, no venue fee, and no house caterer.

The house works as a set of outdoor rooms with a large building in the middle of them, which is the arrangement that suits a wedding of sixty or eighty far better than a single lawn does.

The ceremony setting, shaded, level, and comfortable at the hour a Provençal ceremony actually happens.

The part of the house guests gravitate to, and the space the owners point at for dinner. Custom tent options are available for it, which is how the courtyard becomes the wet-weather answer as well as the fine-weather one.

Lined with lavender and olive trees, and the second dinner setting: a long table down the middle of it, which at eighty guests photographs better than the courtyard does.

Covered, with a wood-fired oven and a marble prep area, seating sixteen and expandable to twenty-four. This is where the welcome dinner goes.

Two of them. One is a full professional kitchen with a commercial Charvet range and a service kitchen attached, the other a domestic one with a Lacanche. There is also a summer kitchen with a wood-fired grill. A caterer arriving here finds more equipment than at most venues, which shows up in what they quote.

A La Bastide de Laurence wedding starts from €100,000 and lands near €200,000 all-in for 50 to 80 guests.

Rented rather than hired, normally Friday to Friday. In 2027 a week runs €22,000 in February, March, October and December, around €25,000 in May and late September, and just under €29,000 through June, July and August. The rate includes the whole property, the welcome spread on arrival, a shopping service before you come, and housekeeping with a crew of eight on changeover plus two midweek cleans.

Shorter stays are available on selected dates. A Friday to Monday is between €18,000 and €20,000 and a Tuesday to Friday between €15,000 and €17,000, and both are offered only for events of forty guests or fewer, from September to May.

Tourist tax is €4.80 per adult per night on top.

There is no buyout fee and no venue fee. What an event adds instead are three services at flat rates set by headcount. For 61 to 80 guests they are €660 for post-event cleaning, €600 for the house ambassador who is on site from four in the afternoon until midnight, and €300 for the housekeeping expeditor from six until midnight. With twenty per cent tax that is under €2,000 in total.

Extra hours are €90 for the ambassador and €60 for the expeditor. The services are billed once the guest count is fixed, six months before arrival.

Everything a venue would normally include. The caterer, the furniture, the tent, the flowers, the music, the photography, the transfers and the rooms for the sixty-odd guests who are not in the house. The owners keep a list of suppliers they work with and hand it over, and the wine cellar is stocked by a local merchant at cost, settled at checkout.

The contract permits a maximum of four large events of 40 to 80 people in a calendar year, approved at the point of signature, and one principal event plus one supporting event per booking. A rehearsal dinner on the sunset terrace or a brunch in the gardens counts as the supporting event, so a three-part weekend needs agreeing in advance rather than assuming.

Eight guest rooms, all en-suite, four with king beds and four with queens, sleeping sixteen. A studio with a separate entrance, a pull-out double, kitchenette and full bathroom adds two more at €200 a night. Toiletries, staples and linen are stocked.

Sixteen beds against a wedding of eighty is the limitation here.

The owners keep a list of hotels and private villas between four hundred metres and three kilometres away, some of which privatise, with transport arranged to and from the house. L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is ten minutes and holds a good spread, and Gordes and Ménerbes are within half an hour for couples who want the block somewhere more photogenic.

The house is outside L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in the Vaucluse, at the western edge of the Luberon.

Gordes is 25 minutes, Ménerbes 30, Avignon 40 and Aix-en-Provence an hour. The sea at Marseille is an hour and thirteen.

Avignon TGV is 42 minutes. Marseille airport is an hour and one, which is the practical arrival point for most international guests, and L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue has its own small station for anybody coming across from Avignon.

L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue calls itself the antiques capital of France and has the canals to justify its other nickname. For a guest list arriving on a Thursday with nothing scheduled until Friday evening, having a real town ten minutes away with a Sunday market in it is worth more than another swimming pool.

The absence of a venue fee is the headline and it deserves reading carefully. A week in May at €25,000 with under €2,000 of event services is a fraction of what a comparable Luberon estate charges for two nights, and the money that would have gone to a venue goes to the caterer, the tent and the furniture instead. The total lands in the same region. What changes is who controls it, and here that is you.

The second thing is that a house with no banqueting operation needs a real caterer and a real production plan. There is no in-house team to absorb a mistake at six o’clock on the Saturday, which is the argument for a proper kitchen, a proper tent and a proper rehearsal rather than for anxiety.

The third is the four-event rule, which is the scarcity nobody sees coming. Four large events a year across the whole calendar means the good May and September weekends are claimed a long way out, and the contract has to name your event at signature. If a date matters, it gets locked before the caterer is chosen.

Then there are the sixteen beds. Eighty guests and sixteen beds means almost everybody is arriving and leaving by road on both evenings, so the transfer plan is the production, not a detail of it. The compensation is that the sixteen people who do sleep here get a week in the house rather than two nights in a hotel, and that is usually the reason a couple chose it.

We always contract the caterer before the furniture at a house like this, because the kitchen decides what the rest of the weekend can be, though it means committing to a menu earlier than most couples expect to.

Magic Day plans weddings at La Bastide de Laurence from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the date and the four-event allowance behind it, the week against the three-night option, the caterer and what the two kitchens let them do, the tent for the courtyard, the curfew agreed in writing before contract, the symbolic ceremony under the plane trees and the mairie paperwork behind it, and the block in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue with the coaches that go with it.

We have worked across Provence for years, and houses like this one are the part of the market where a planner earns the fee twice over. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people, and we will tell you what the week comes to.