Le Mas des Poiriers wedding

The farmhouse dates from the eighteenth century, and its oldest building, the stone cottage in the garden, was the first on the property. It takes its name from the pear orchard around it, still worked, with fields of sunflowers or wheat beyond.

Its present owners restored it throughout, with interiors after La Mirande, the hotel in the old town of Avignon, Pierre Frey fabrics in every bedroom and Four Seasons beds, and in 2017 Dominique Lafourcade, the garden designer of Saint-Rémy, laid out its gardens in the Provençal manner.

The Obamas spent a week here in June 2019. The same month the Olympic ice-dancing champion Meryl Davis married Fedor Andreev in the garden, before some ninety-five guests.

The house has appeared in House & Garden, Town & Country, Veranda and Vogue France.

The whole property is the wedding’s for three days, and the weekend moves between the gardens, the house and the orchards.

Dominique Lafourcade’s gardens surround the house in a series of rooms, a lawn between columns of cypress, parterres of box and pots of clipped topiary, and they take the ceremony.

The lawn below the long, blue-shuttered front takes the dinner at long tables, for up to 200.

The terrace along the house is for the rehearsal dinner by candlelight.

The orangerie, with its long table by Hervé Baume for 22, is for the family dinner.

The pool and its pool house, the tennis court and the pétanque ground are for the days around the wedding.

An avenue of old plane trees brings the guests in from the lane.

Nine bedrooms for 16 guests, and all of them come with the house, with the house’s service for the guests who stay.

Seven are in the main house of 13,000 square feet: the Master, a corner suite over the gardens and the orchard with a Pierre Frey canopy bed and a bathroom of marble, and Fontaine, Poirier, Jacques et George, Samantha, Audrey and Marguerite. Two more, Olivier and Lavande, are in the stone cottage in the garden, by the pool and the tennis court. Every bed has Four Seasons mattresses and linen, and every bathroom Buly.

We give the Master to the couple and the cottage to a young family. The house cannot sleep a wedding of 200, so the rest of the guests stay in Avignon or Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, twenty minutes away, and come out by shuttle.

The house stands on the Île de la Barthelasse, the island in the Rhône across from the walls of Avignon. The Palais des Papes and Villeneuve-lès-Avignon are twenty minutes away, Châteauneuf-du-Pape just over half an hour, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence three quarters of an hour and the Pont du Gard under an hour.

Marseille Provence is the airport to give guests, an hour and twenty minutes by road, and Nîmes is an hour. Avignon’s airport, half an hour away, takes private aircraft.

Avignon TGV, twenty-five minutes from the house, is under three hours from Paris by train.

The house is taken whole for three days, with its nine bedrooms and their service: €135,000 plus VAT.

• The house, the gardens, the orchards, the pool and the tennis court, for three days
• Nine bedrooms for 16 guests
• The house’s service for the guests who stay

The catering, the tables and chairs, the flowers and every other part of the wedding come in through the planner, whom the house requires. The design, the music, the photography, the rooms in Avignon and the shuttles sit outside the house’s figure.

A Magic Day wedding at Le Mas des Poiriers starts from €350,000 and lands near €500,000.

The house wants a planner. Le Mas des Poiriers asks every wedding to come with one, and everything beyond the house arrives through the planner: the caterer, the tables for 200, the lighting for the lawn. We build the wedding into the gardens as if it had always been there.

Three days, three settings. The buyout runs three days. We schedule the rehearsal dinner on the terrace, the wedding on the lawn and the brunch by the pool, and keep the orangerie for the family.

Mind the Mistral. The Rhône valley’s wind comes down past Avignon hardest in spring and autumn. We plan every outdoor moment with a covered answer ready on the lawn.

Put the guests inside the walls. The house sleeps 16, and Avignon is twenty minutes away. We hold rooms in the old town and run the shuttles across the river.

Le Mas des Poiriers gives a wedding an eighteenth-century farmhouse on an island in the Rhône, Dominique Lafourcade’s gardens, nine bedrooms and a house staff, for three days. What it leaves to the couple is the wedding itself, and it asks that a planner deliver it: the caterer, the tables, the design, the flowers, the music, and the rooms and shuttles for everyone beyond its 16 beds.

That is a planner’s work, and at a private house that builds a wedding for 200 from the lawn up, all of it is.

Magic Day plans weddings at Le Mas des Poiriers from the first conversation to the final farewell.