Mas d'Arvieux wedding

The mas stands in seven hectares between Tarascon and Saint-Rémy, at the western end of the Alpilles, behind gate piers and a lavender field. The house is sixteenth-century and has been restored rather than rebuilt: thick walls, a courtyard, a turret at one corner and five hundred years of a farm underneath it.

The land around it is planted with olives, lavender and Mediterranean trees, with a park of undergrowth beyond.

What separates it from the other estates of the Alpilles is that the outdoor rooms are built rather than borrowed. A courtyard of over two hundred square metres, a covered space of 210 more opening onto the park, and an air-conditioned hall of 190 mean a wedding here has somewhere to be at every hour and in any weather.

The estate is arranged as four spaces that run into one another, which is what lets a wedding of 150 move without a marquee.

Where the ceremony goes. The estate keeps several settings for it, including the undergrowth, the lavender field in flower and the olive grove.

In front of the courtyard, with its own sound system, and where the cocktail hour happens.

Over two hundred square metres, opening onto the park, wired for sound and strung with lights. It is the heart of the evening.

Two hundred and ten square metres under a roof with the park on one side, taking all 150 for dinner. It is not a marquee and it does not have to be hired.

A hundred and ninety square metres, air-conditioned, with its own sound system. This is where the dancing goes, which in the Bouches-du-Rhône it was always going to.

A Mas d’Arvieux wedding starts from €120,000 and lands near €200,000 all-in for 80 to 150 guests.

The estate sells a weekend rather than an evening: Friday at four until Sunday at five, with the reception areas, the accommodation and the breakfasts in a single figure. The rate is set by the season and by whether the guest list is over 120.

Out of season, which runs October to mid-April, it is just under €12,000. In the middle season, mid-April to early June and late August to early October, it is just under €16,000 up to 120 guests and just under €18,000 to 150. High summer, 12 July to 29 August, is just under €18,000 and just under €20,000.

The dearest weeks of the year are 4 June to 11 July, at just under €22,000 and just under €24,000, which is about €4,000 more than August. That is the estate pricing its own lavender field in flower, and it is honest about why.

Monday to Thursday takes 20% off any of those figures and adds the furniture for the ceremony and the wedding dinner at no charge, which on an estate that otherwise rents chairs and tables is a larger saving than the percentage suggests.

The catering, the flowers, the music, the photography, the transfers, and the hotel rooms for everybody beyond the thirty the estate sleeps. A welcome dinner the night before can be arranged on request.

Thirty people sleep on the estate across eight lodgings: bedrooms in the mas itself, private suites, and cottages in the grounds. They are part of the weekend rate rather than a separate booking, and breakfast is included in it.

Thirty beds against a dinner for 150 is the limitation here, though the geography softens it.

Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is sixteen minutes away and Tarascon closer still, and between them they hold more rooms at more price points than anywhere else in the Alpilles. We always put the two families on the estate and build the block in Saint-Rémy, because guests who want a town to walk into on the Friday evening have one.

The mas is on the chemin du Mas d’Arvieux outside Tarascon, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, on the flat land west of the Alpilles.

Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is 16 minutes and Avignon 24. Gordes is 50, Aix an hour and nine, and Marseille an hour and twenty-two.

Avignon TGV is 17 minutes, which is the shortest run to a TGV station of any venue on this site and puts Paris two hours forty from the platform. Marseille airport is an hour and ten. For a guest list coming from northern Europe the train is not the second option here, it is the first.

The estate is registered as an Établissement Recevant du Public, which means it is inspected against the public-assembly safety standards and insured accordingly. Not every private estate in Provence is, and it is worth asking of any of them.

The lavender pricing tells you what this estate is for. Four June to eleven July costs about €4,000 more than August, because that is when the field in front of the house is in flower and that is what the photographs are of. We always say this out loud early: if the lavender is the reason a couple wants the Alpilles, those five weeks are the wedding and the rest of the year is a different venue.

The second thing is the weekday discount, which is unusually large.

Twenty per cent off the hire and free furniture for the ceremony and the dinner is worth several thousand euros on this estate, and a Thursday in the lavender weeks costs less than a Saturday in the middle season. For a guest list that is travelling anyway, and most of a destination guest list is, the day of the week matters less than it does at home.

The third is the built cover. A covered outdoor room of 210 square metres and an air-conditioned hall of 190 mean no marquee, no wet-weather contingency priced in June and no tent standing on the lawn for three days. On an estate of this size that is the difference between a straightforward production and a complicated one, and it is why a wedding of 150 fits here at all.

Magic Day plans weddings at Mas d’Arvieux from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the dates and whether they fall in the lavender weeks, the weekday question and what it saves, the symbolic ceremony in the field or the olive grove and the mairie paperwork behind it, the caterer and the kitchen, the eight lodgings and the block in Saint-Rémy, and the trains into Avignon.

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.