Mas de Chabran wedding

The house began in 1738 as an oil mill with more than three hundred olive trees around it, and two presses working inside. One of those presses is still there, standing under the vaults of what is now the living room.

It stopped being a mill when it became the home of Pierre Chabran, a notary from Saint-Rémy, who turned the olive grove into a jardin à la française and added the château-like wing the house is recognised by, with its limestone facade and the fountain in front of it.

In 2017 it was bought by an interior designer and an architect, restored over two years, and opened to guests in 2019. It is one of nine houses in Les Domaines de Chabran and the only one of them that takes weddings, which it does a handful of times a year under conditions it publishes in advance.

There is no reception room here in the sense a wedding venue uses the word. There is a house with vaulted rooms and carved stone arches, a formal garden with a fountain in the middle of it, a long pool, and terraces between them.

Laid out in the eighteenth century and still on its original geometry, with clipped hedges, gravel walks and the fountain at the centre. The ceremony goes here.

Where the cocktail hour and dinner for forty sit, in front of the limestone facade.

The interior of the old mill, whitewashed, with the surviving press in the living room and arched windows the height of the walls opening onto the garden. This is where the evening finishes after ten.

A long pool with a teak deck set in the lawn, and the gardens around it kept by the estate’s own team, with extra work done before and after a wedding as part of the rate.

A Mas de Chabran wedding starts from €150,000 and lands near €250,000 all-in for up to 40 guests.

€45,000 for three nights, which is the minimum stay. The estate flags a likely rise of ten to fifteen per cent for 2027, so a 2027 wedding should be budgeted nearer €50,000 for the same three nights.

More than a venue hire usually does. Sole use of the whole property, the eight double bedrooms for sixteen guests, daily breakfast made with local and seasonal produce, daily housekeeping, the upkeep of the garden and the pool, welcome products and kitchen equipment, and a daily concierge and house management service.

On the wedding itself it also covers twenty additional hours of cleaning across the rehearsal dinner, the wedding day and the day after, the transport and setting up of the event furniture, extra gardening before and after, a deep clean of the stone floors by a specialist firm, and the house manager on site until nine on the wedding evening to run the suppliers.

The catering and the kitchen brigade, the flowers, the furniture itself, the music, the photography, the transfers and the rooms for the twenty-four guests who are not sleeping in the house. Everything is brought in, which is what a private house means.

Weddings are accepted only in January, March, April, May, September, October and November. There is no high-season rate here because there is no high season: the months that cost the most elsewhere in the Alpilles are the months this house does not take weddings at all.

Outdoor music stops at ten in the evening and the celebration moves inside. That is the house’s own rule, written into its conditions before anybody asks, and at ten it is the earliest outdoor curfew of any Provençal venue on this site.

The Bouches-du-Rhône prefectural order already bans loudspeakers outdoors at venues and in their gardens, so the dance floor was always going to be indoors in this department. What Mas de Chabran adds on top is an hour after which the garden itself goes quiet, including the acoustic music and the speeches that other estates let run.

For forty guests in a house with vaulted rooms this matters less than it sounds, and we get the indoor finishing time confirmed in writing at contract stage so that the shape of the evening is agreed by everyone before the invitations go out.

Eight double bedrooms sleeping sixteen, with breakfast and daily housekeeping in the rental rate. The rooms are in the house itself, several of them under the old vaults, and the restoration put the bathrooms in without taking the stone out.

Sixteen beds against a wedding of forty is a gap the geography closes easily.

Maussane-les-Alpilles is five minutes and has hotels and maisons d’hôtes in the village. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is twenty minutes and holds the largest concentration of good rooms in the Alpilles, and Les Baux is fifteen. For a guest list of forty the block is small enough to put everybody in one place, which we do.

The house is on the chemin du Mas de Chabran outside Maussane-les-Alpilles, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, on the southern side of the Alpilles.

Les Baux-de-Provence is 15 minutes, Saint-Rémy 20, Arles 30 and Avignon 43. Aix-en-Provence is 57 and Marseille an hour and ten.

Avignon TGV is 37 minutes and puts Paris two hours forty from the platform. Marseille airport is 57 minutes and Nîmes 50. For a guest list of forty coming from London or Paris, the train is usually the better answer.

The conditions are the venue. Forty guests, three nights, low season only and music off outdoors at ten are not obstacles to work around; they are the shape of the wedding this house will host, and they are published before anybody enquires. Couples who want them want them specifically. Couples who want a hundred and fifty people dancing under the stars until two want a different estate in the same valley, and there are several.

The second thing is what the €45,000 actually buys, which is unusually broad. The house manager on site, the supplier coordination, the extra cleaning, the furniture moved and set up, and the gardens brought up before and put back after are all lines that appear on somebody else’s invoice at most private estates. Read against that, the figure is closer to the market than it first looks.

The third is that everything else still has to be brought in. There is no kitchen brigade, no furniture inventory and no wet-weather room built for a hundred people. For forty guests in the Alpilles in May that is a straightforward production, and it is the reason this house takes only a few weddings a year.

Then there is the ten o’clock rule, which is the one we put in front of couples first. An evening that moves indoors at ten is a different evening.

We never sell this house to a couple who want a late party, because the rule is published and it will not move, though the couples who love it were going to have a long dinner rather than a long dance floor anyway.

Magic Day plans weddings at Mas de Chabran from the first conversation to the final farewell. That means the date inside the months the house accepts, the three nights and what goes in them, the caterer and the kitchen that has to be built around them, the furniture, the ten o’clock rule and the indoor finish confirmed in writing, the symbolic ceremony in the French garden and the mairie paperwork behind it, and the block in Maussane or 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 three nights come to.