Shangri-La Paris wedding

Prince Roland Bonaparte was Napoleon’s great-nephew, a geographer and a botanist, and in 1896 he built himself a house on avenue d’Iéna. The Eiffel Tower had been standing for seven years half a mile away, and he arranged his first floor to look at it.

The house became a hotel in December 2010, restored by the architect Richard Martinet, and it had been listed as a Historical Monument the year before.

What the listing protects is the part you get married in.

Three salons on that first floor run into one another: the Grand Salon, the Salle à Manger and the Salon de Famille, 350 square metres between them under ceilings of nearly seven metres. They open onto a terrace with the tower in front of you.

Around them the hotel keeps 100 rooms and suites, a garden laid out by Louis Benech and a spa with a seventeen-metre pool. Your guests sleep where they danced, which in central Paris is rarer than it sounds.

Here is how the building wants the day to run.

Ceremony in the Salle à Manger or the Salon de Famille, drinks through the connecting doors and out onto the Eiffel Terrace, dinner in the Grand Salon. Then up one floor to the Salon Roland Bonaparte, where the stables used to be, for the part with the dance floor.

Two floors, one lift, no coaches.

The honest limitation is that the Shangri-La sells salons rather than the hotel. Other guests are in the lobby, and the historic rooms have to be fully privatised before the terrace becomes yours.

France will not marry you here. The civil ceremony belongs to the mairie and carries a residency requirement that rules out almost every foreign couple, so you marry at home first and hold the ceremony you actually want in Paris.

That frees the room choice completely. The Salle à Manger seats 90 facing forward, with the eagles and the mahogany trophies behind you; the Salon de Famille takes 40 and is the gentler room, painted with winged figures under a ceiling ring of sphinxes.

We use the Grand Salon for the ceremony only above 90 guests, because turning that room round afterwards costs you the drinks hour.

140 square metres on the first floor, nine metres by eighteen, decorated in Louis XIV style and looking onto avenue d’Iéna. The white marble fireplace, the trumeau mirror above it, the gilded consoles and the crystal chandeliers are original to the house. 120 on round tables, 150 for cocktails, 130 seated theatre-style.

Look up and the plasterwork is crowns and bees, which is the family telling you whose house this is. It is the room the whole floor is arranged around, and it is where dinner belongs.

It connects to the Gallery, another 80 square metres under a stained-glass window, which is where the drinks go when the weather keeps everyone inside.

105 square metres, eight metres by sixteen, ceiling at 6.8 metres, given over to the glory of the Emperor. Mahogany carvings of arms and military trophies fill the arches above the doors, and two eagles with spread wings hold the corners of the room. 96 on round tables, 90 theatre-style, 80 for cocktails.

Its window opens onto the terrace. That makes it the room to marry in when you want the ceremony and the drinks to be one continuous movement rather than two rooms and an announcement.

105 square metres, seven metres by sixteen, the same 6.8-metre ceiling and the lightest of the three. The panelled walls carry winged women around a medallion, reproduced during the restoration from the fresco given to Malmaison, and the ceiling runs a circle of sphinxes and plants. 84 on round tables, 80 for cocktails, 40 theatre-style.

This is the room for a wedding of forty, and the reason the Shangri-La works at that size at all. Forty people in the Grand Salon look like a rehearsal.

The three salons open straight onto it, and the tower stands directly in front of you across the rooftops of the sixteenth.

It is a shared space. The hotel will reserve it for you, but only once the historic salons are fully privatised, and that condition is worth settling in writing before the date is held rather than after.

230 square metres on the second floor, seventeen metres by sixteen, built into Prince Roland’s former stables. The stone archway and the wall frescoes are what survived them; the tall bay windows are what was added. 220 on round tables, 300 for cocktails, 220 theatre-style.

It is soundproofed, wired with a sound system, projectors and screens, and it is the only room where the dance floor and the stage come included rather than quoted. That sentence is the whole argument for ending the night up here.

The trade is that it is the one room in the building without a listing on it. You gain a party and give up the plasterwork.

The Grand Salon, the Salle à Manger and the Salon de Famille communicate, so the first floor runs as 350 square metres in one piece or as three rooms with doors between them. The Gallery adds 80 more and the terrace adds the view.

That is what makes the building work from 40 guests to 220, which is a range most Paris hotels handle at one end only.

We plan to a hundred. Past 120 the Grand Salon cannot seat everyone, dinner has to move upstairs, and the three listed salons turn into rooms your guests walk through rather than rooms they sit in.

One hundred rooms and suites, from a 36-square-metre Superior to the 315 square metres of the Appartement Prince Bonaparte.

The categories that matter for a wedding are the ones with the tower in the window. Eiffel View Rooms are 45 square metres, Terrace Eiffel View Rooms 55 with a terrace of their own, and the signature suites named for Gustave Eiffel and for Chaillot look straight at it from private terraces.

The Pearl and Jade wedding packages each include a Deluxe Suite for the wedding night, around 60 square metres with a separate sitting room. It is the one piece of the accommodation you do not have to negotiate.

Below all of it sits a spa with a seventeen-metre pool opening onto a green terrace, and the garden Louis Benech laid out. Both earn their keep on the morning after, in a way no château fifty minutes outside Paris can match.

Ten avenue d’Iéna, in the sixteenth arrondissement, four streets back from the Seine and facing the tower across it.

Charles de Gaulle is 45 minutes away and carries direct routes from almost everywhere. Orly is 30 minutes, and closer than most guests expect.

Paris-Le Bourget is the business airport for the city and sits north-east of it.

Eurostar from London reaches Gare du Nord in a little over two hours, and Paris’s six main stations are all within reach. Iéna is the metro station and it is a few minutes on foot, which matters more than any of the above for guests staying elsewhere.

There is no buyout here.

You take the salons you need and the hotel prices the catering by the head, so the number moves with the rooms, the hours and the menu rather than sitting as one fixed figure. The curfew moves it too, because the room that has no early one is a second hire.

From €100,000 all-in for 40 guests. That carries the salons, the catering, florals, lighting, entertainment, photography and the production around them.

It comes into its own from €150,000, which is roughly where a hundred guests, both floors and a production worth those ceilings stop competing for the same money.

The hotel’s own packages run from roughly €360 to €490 a head, VAT included and room hire excluded. What separates them is the number of canapés, the wine, the length of the open bar, and whether the wedding-night suite is in or out.

Everything visual is quoted separately. Florals, lighting, music and photography sit outside the package, and they are where the evening becomes recognisably yours rather than the hotel’s.

Which salons, and for how long. Taking the historic floor and the Salon Roland Bonaparte on the same evening is two hires rather than one, and it is also the sequence we would recommend, so budget for it early instead of discovering it late.

Year-round. The three salons are indoors under listed ceilings and photograph the same in February as in June.

The terrace and the garden are the seasonal part. They are worth building a summer date around rather than treating as a bonus.

The tower is a first-floor privilege. From the street you cannot see it. From the salons and the terrace you cannot avoid it. Anyone planning the drinks in the lobby has not walked the building.

End in the stables. The Salon Roland Bonaparte is soundproofed and arrives with the dance floor and the stage. The listed salons are the opposite of soundproofed and sit between floors of bedrooms, so their curfew is the earlier one and the terrace’s is earlier still.

Forty guests belong in the Salon de Famille. The instinct is to take the largest room available. At forty it is the wrong one, and the Salon de Famille was built for exactly this number by a family that entertained at exactly this scale.

Settle the terrace in writing. It is shared until the historic salons are fully privatised. That is a condition rather than a formality, and it is the single thing we see couples assume instead of confirm.

The kitchen is the hotel’s. No outside caterer, and no argument to have about it. Ask for the tasting lunch the packages include, and use it to fix the menu rather than to admire it.

Guests walk, or take one lift. Ceremony, drinks, dinner and dancing sit on two floors of one building, and the people staying upstairs never go outside. In Paris in November that is worth more than any view.

The Shangri-La provides the salons, the terrace, the kitchen and a hundred bedrooms, and it does all four to a standard very few hotels in the city match. Design, florals, staging, sound, lighting, entertainment, photography and the timeline sit with the planner.

So does the part nobody writes down: the order in which a hundred people move from a listed salon on one floor to a converted stable on the next without the evening losing its shape. That sequence is worth designing before a single room is contracted.

Magic Day plans weddings at the Shangri-La Paris from the first conversation to the final farewell.