Le Mas de la Rose wedding

The mas sits in twenty hectares on the road out of Orgon towards Eygalières, at the eastern end of the Alpilles and inside the regional park. It is not one building. It is several drystone ones from the seventeenth century, set around courtyards and terraces, with olive trees, oaks and lavender between them and the Alpilles rising behind.

The pool is cut into the lawn below the main terrace and the whole group faces south.

What makes it work as a wedding venue is the number of separate outdoor rooms this arrangement creates. A ceremony in the garden, a cocktail hour on a different terrace, dinner in a courtyard and dancing indoors all happen in sight of each other without happening in the same place, which on a flat site with one lawn is the thing money cannot buy.

The estate is privatised whole on the day of the reception: the reception areas, the restaurant, the terraces, the gardens, the pool, the jacuzzi, the tennis court and the car park. The car park is watched and there is technical supervision on site for the reception itself.

Where the ceremony goes, with the Alpilles behind and, from early June to mid-July, the lavender in flower in front of it.

Several of them at different levels, which is how the cocktail hour and the dinner end up in different places without anybody walking far.

The estate’s own restaurant, named for the kitchen garden that supplies it. The menus are built on organically grown vegetables from that garden or from growers nearby, and the kitchen is the only one that cooks here.

Indoors, and where the dancing happens, for the reason the whole of the Bouches-du-Rhône dances indoors.

A Le Mas de la Rose wedding starts from €100,000 and lands near €200,000 all-in for 80 to 150 guests.

The privatisation fee and the twelve rooms are a single booking and the brochure is explicit that one cannot be taken without the other. The venue side runs from just under €5,000 for a low-season weekday to just over €13,000 for a weekend in June, July or August. The rooms are between €4,000 and €7,000 a night depending on season and on whether breakfast is in.

This is the number that surprises people. On a date including a Saturday the estate requires one night in April and October, two in May and September, and three across the summer, with three again over the Ascension, Pentecost and Easter weekends. Weekdays from Monday to Thursday need one night year round, except in July and August and across those three long weekends.

An October Saturday therefore comes to just under €12,000 for the estate and all twelve rooms. A June Saturday comes to just over €32,000, and almost all of that difference is the two extra nights rather than the higher rate.

Dinner is €90, €98, €108 or €133 a head across four menus, with the water and the hot drinks included and alcohol extra. Cocktail canapés are €28 to €33 a head for eight to twelve pieces, wine packages €21 to €32, and the brunch the following day €48 or €58. A night buffet is priced per fifty guests at around €300 a platter and the midnight bar is €25 a head if you bring the spirits and €35 if the estate does.

Groups of 40 to 50 pay a 10 per cent surcharge in April and October and 20 per cent in May and September, and groups of 60 to 80 pay 20 and 10 per cent across June, July and August. A small wedding here is dearer per head than a large one, which is the opposite of the usual shape.

Furniture, which has to be hired for every guest and for the whole event from the estate’s catalogue. The flowers, the music, the photography, the transfers, and a marquee if you want one, which is quoted separately. Gas heaters are €168 each.

Couples may bring their own wine and champagne for the cocktail and the dinner against a corkage fee of €12 a bottle of wine and €15 of champagne. Very few estates at this level in Provence permit it at any price, and on a guest list of 150 with a good champagne it is worth several thousand euros.

The brochure says the evening reception has no time limit, and the estate means it. There is no closing hour written into the contract and no charge for running late.

The constraint is not the estate. The Bouches-du-Rhône prefectural order bans loudspeakers outdoors at venues and in their gardens, which means amplified music has to be inside the reception rooms wherever you are in the department. So the shape of the evening is fixed even where the hour is not: the ceremony, the cocktail hour and the dinner outdoors, then the party moves in and stays as long as it likes.

We get the absence of a closing hour written into the contract anyway, because a venue’s custom and a venue’s contract are different documents.

Twelve bedrooms that sleep 24 to 28, described by the estate as hotel rooms with hotel service rather than as a house to be filled. They are part of the privatisation booking rather than an optional extra, and the brochure notes they can be recharged to the guests staying in them, which is what most couples do.

Twenty-eight beds against a dinner for 150 is the limitation here.

Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is twenty-five minutes, Cavaillon fifteen and Avignon under forty, and between them they hold more rooms at more price points than the Alpilles has anywhere else. We put the two families on the estate and build the block in Saint-Rémy, where guests have a town to walk into on the Friday evening.

The mas is on the route d’Eygalières outside Orgon, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, at the point where the Alpilles meet the Durance plain.

Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is 25 minutes, Avignon 38, Aix-en-Provence 44 and Gordes 40. Marseille is 56.

Avignon TGV is 37 minutes and puts Paris two hours forty from the platform. Marseille airport is 44 minutes, which is among the shortest airport runs of any estate in the Alpilles, and Aix TGV is a similar distance for guests coming from the east.

The minimum-stay rule is the whole negotiation. Two extra nights in June cost about €13,000 in rooms alone, which is more than the venue fee, and it is the single largest lever on the budget at this estate. A Thursday or a Friday wedding in May costs a fraction of a Saturday in July for the same weather and the same lavender, and we put that in front of couples before anything else.

The second thing is the surcharge structure, which runs backwards. Most estates discount small weddings and this one charges them 10 or 20 per cent more, because the kitchen and the service brigade cost the same either way. Below about sixty guests the per-head economics here stop being competitive, and we never put a wedding of forty in front of this estate without saying so first.

The third is the corkage. Twelve euros a bottle of wine and fifteen of champagne is close to unique in this price band in Provence, and for a guest list that cares about what is in the glass it changes the arithmetic of the whole cocktail hour. It is worth asking the estate to confirm it in writing at contract stage, because it is a concession rather than a policy.

Then there is the tent. The reception rooms hold the party and the estate has covered space for dinner, and a marquee here is a choice about scale rather than a wet-weather necessity. For 150 guests in June we usually find we do not need one, which on a Provençal estate is unusual enough to be the reason a couple picks this one.

Magic Day plans weddings at Le Mas de la Rose from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the date and what the minimum stay does to it, the twelve rooms and who pays for them, the menus and the surcharge bands, the corkage in writing, the symbolic ceremony in the garden and the mairie paperwork behind it, the furniture hire nobody budgets for, and the block in Saint-Rémy.

We have worked across Provence for years, and the Alpilles is the part of it couples fall for first. Tell us the dates you are considering and how many people, and we will tell you what the weekend comes to.