Ritz Paris wedding

César Ritz was a Swiss shepherd’s son who had been sacked from his first hotel job for having no aptitude for the business.

He opened this one on 1 June 1898, on Place Vendôme, with Auguste Escoffier in the kitchen. Between them they invented most of what a grand hotel now takes for granted: a bathroom to every bedroom, electric light throughout, a chef whose name people knew.

Then the guests moved in and stayed. Marcel Proust wrote here and ate here, and Coco Chanel lived upstairs for more than thirty years.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway drank in the bar that now carries Hemingway’s name, and sixteen Prestige suites are named for the people who occupied them.

The hotel closed in 2012 and did not reopen until 2016. Four years, under the architect Thierry Despont, who raised ceilings, opened windows and put a retractable glass roof over the restaurant, and who was given the harder brief of leaving it recognisably itself.

L’Espadon took a Michelin star in 2024 under Eugénie Béziat, and it is the only starred restaurant on Place Vendôme.

Here is the thing to hold on to for a wedding. Behind that façade, in the middle of the first arrondissement, is five hundred square metres of private garden with magnolias and a fountain and no traffic noise. Paris has almost nothing else like it.

Here is how we build the day, and the building lays it out for you.

Vows in the Grand Jardin under the magnolias, with the Salon d’Été standing by if the weather turns. Cocktails through the connecting salons on the garden level. Then down the marble staircase to the Salon Vendôme, where the doors close and the night stops having a deadline.

Garden, salons, staircase, ballroom. The descent is the choreography.

The honest limitation sits alongside it. The Ritz sells salons, not the hotel, so guests will cross a lobby that other people are also using. At a château taken whole that never happens, and this is the trade you are making for the address and the price.

500 m² of private garden in the first arrondissement: white flowers, magnolias, a fountain, gravel walks and shaded alcoves cut into the hedges. Ceremonies of up to 120, or 400 standing for a garden party.

This is the reason to choose the Ritz over any other Paris hotel. We recommend the ceremony here in any month the weather allows, and the Salon d’Été as the fallback rather than a second plan. A garden of this size behind a Place Vendôme façade is a trick the city cannot repeat.

Down a private lobby and a marble staircase, 217 m² of ballroom with Versailles parquet, fully soundproofed and below ground. 187 seated on rounds, or 121 once a dance floor goes in.

No curfew. That is the sentence that matters. Almost every Paris venue hands you a finishing time; this room does not, because there is nobody above it to disturb. Build the night around that and the room pays for itself.

106 m² under a glass roof, opening onto a terrace and the garden beyond. 96 seated for a ceremony, 100 for cocktails.

Its real job is insurance. It is the garden’s weather plan and it does not feel like one, which is why a Ritz wedding can be booked for April without a knot in the stomach.

140 m² under a painted trompe-l’oeil sky, mirrors on every wall, and the ceremonial chandelier hung for the hotel’s opening in 1898. 121 on round tables, 130 for cocktails.

This was the Grand Dining Room when the Ritz opened, and it is the only room other than the ballroom that seats more than a hundred. It takes its name from Marie-Louise Ritz, who ran the house alongside César and set what staying here would feel like.

The trade against the Salon Vendôme is the curfew. This room has windows, and bedrooms above them, so the music comes down where the ballroom’s does not.

A covered patio under a Belle Époque glass roof that opens with the weather, 106 m², next door to the Salon Marie-Louise. 55 on round tables, 70 for cocktails.

It suits a seated dinner that wants daylight without weather, which in Paris in April is a more useful thing than it sounds. Taken with the salon beside it, the pair carries a reception and a dinner without anyone crossing the hotel.

106 m² of gilded woodwork, mirrors and crystal, named for the king they called the Beloved. 100 for a ceremony or cocktails, 49 on cabaret rounds.

For a wedding of fifty this is the room we would take, not the ballroom. Fifty people in the Salon Vendôme rattle; fifty in here look like the guest list of somebody with taste.

76 m² under a high painted ceiling, with gold-leaf woodwork and an Aubusson tapestry of Psyche guided by love. 60 for a ceremony or cocktails, 35 on cabaret rounds.

The smallest of the grand rooms and the most decorated. It needs almost nothing done to it, which is worth remembering before the florals are designed.

69 m², the quietest room in the suite, with two doors and one of them straight into the Grand Jardin. 44 on round tables, 60 for cocktails.

We use it as the room nobody sees: where the couple sign, where a family gathers before the doors open, where a supplier sets up out of sight.

The Salon d’Été opens into Psyché, Louis XV and de Gramont, so the garden level runs as one space of around 260 m² or four connected ones. The Salon Marie-Louise pairs with the Verrière beside it, and the Salon Vendôme stands alone.

That flexibility is what makes the Ritz work between 40 and 100 guests, which is a range most Paris venues handle at only one end.

One hundred and forty-two rooms and suites, sixteen of them Prestige suites named for the guests who lived in them.

The hotel does not sell a buyout, so a wedding takes a room block rather than the building. That is less romantic and considerably cheaper, and on Place Vendôme it barely matters, because the overflow walks to another palace hotel in five minutes.

Put the couple in a Prestige suite and the parents on the same floor.

The rooms nobody thinks to book are the ones on the garden side. They are quieter than the Place Vendôme side, and on the morning after they look down on where you were married.

Place Vendôme is the octagon Louis XIV built to be looked at, with the column in the middle and the jewellers around the edge. The Ritz has stood on the west side since 1898.

The Tuileries are two minutes’ walk, the Louvre five, the Opéra Garnier ten.

For a Paris wedding this matters more than it does anywhere else, because the guests are not transferred anywhere. They walk.

Charles de Gaulle (CDG) is 45 to 60 minutes depending on traffic, and carries direct routes from almost everywhere in the world. Orly (ORY) is 35 to 45 minutes and serves more of Europe and North Africa.

We move long-haul guests through Charles de Gaulle without exception.

Paris-Le Bourget is Europe’s busiest business aviation airport, about 30 minutes from Place Vendôme.

Eurostar from London St Pancras reaches Gare du Nord in a little over two hours, and Place Vendôme is fifteen minutes on. For a British guest list it beats flying comfortably enough that we build the transport plan around it.

The structure here is simpler than at most venues on this list, and cheaper than any of them.

There is no buyout. You hire the salons you need for the hours you need them, so the venue cost moves with the rooms and the running time rather than sitting as one large fixed number.

From €250,000 all-in for 100 guests. That carries the salons, the catering, florals, lighting, entertainment, photography and the production around them.

It comes into its own from €350,000. Below that the budget is doing two jobs at once, and what usually gives way is the production in the Salon Vendôme, which is the room you came for.

From €100,000 for up to 40 guests without dancing, which is the number that surprises people. A wedding at the Ritz Paris costs a fraction of one at Versailles or the Palais Garnier, because you are not buying a monument for the evening.

The rooms you take and how long you hold them. Catering is the Ritz’s own and it is priced accordingly. And the Salon Vendôme’s lack of a curfew is worth paying for rather than economising against, because the alternative is a Paris venue that stops at a set hour.

Year-round. Every space but the Grand Jardin is under a roof, so the season does not govern the date here the way it governs a château.

That is worth more than it sounds to a couple who cannot move their month. February at the Ritz photographs like June.

The no-curfew room. The Salon Vendôme is soundproofed and below ground, and it does not close at a set hour. Build the evening so the party arrives there rather than ending somewhere else, and do not let the dinner run so long that the room only gets ninety minutes.

Outdoors is a different rule. The windows above the Grand Jardin are guest bedrooms, not neighbours’ houses, which is a stricter constraint rather than a looser one. Amplified music in the garden comes down in the evening. We keep the garden for the ceremony and the first drinks, and settle the exact cut-off in the contract.

A hundred is the ceiling, not 187. The Salon Vendôme’s seated figure assumes the whole floor is tables. Put a dance floor in and it is 121, and the working number is a hundred, because a floor wants room around it rather than a gap between two rounds.

Fifty guests belong in the Louis XV. The instinct is to book the biggest room available. It is the wrong instinct here, and a half-empty Salon Vendôme is the most common way to spend more and get less.

Psyché needs less than you think. It has an Aubusson tapestry on one wall and a painted ceiling above it. Bringing a full floral scheme into it competes with what is already there, and loses.

Guests walk. No coaches, no transfer schedule, no forty minutes of coast road. On Place Vendôme the guest list can stay in three different hotels and still arrive on foot, which removes the single most fragile part of most wedding timelines.

The kitchen is the Ritz’s. No outside caterer, and there is no argument to have about it. Escoffier’s name is on the cooking school downstairs.

The Ritz Paris hires you salons by the hour, feeds your guests from its own kitchen, and sleeps as many of them as your block covers. Design, florals, staging, sound, lighting, entertainment, photography and the timeline sit with the planner.

What a first-timer misses is that the flexibility cuts both ways. Eight spaces that combine in several arrangements is a gift at 40 guests and a trap at a hundred, because the wrong pairing leaves you moving people through a working hotel lobby twice in one evening. The sequence that avoids it runs garden, garden-level salons, then down to the Salon Vendôme, and it is worth designing before a single room is contracted.

Magic Day plans weddings at the Ritz Paris at any scale the hotel holds, from forty in the Salon Louis XV to 204 in the Salon Vendôme, from the first conversation to the final farewell.

Book the ballroom first. Everything else on Place Vendôme can be arranged around it.