Wedding in Paris

A Paris wedding runs €100,000 to €300,000 all-in for 40 guests, €150,000 to €500,000 for 80, and from €350,000 at 150. At the hotels, where you are hiring salons for the evening rather than the building, a wedding comes into its own from €150,000 at the Shangri-La and, for a hundred guests, from €350,000 at the Ritz. Magic Day weddings in Paris start from €100,000.

Paris is not cheaper than the country weddings its couples usually compare it against, and it is not more expensive either. What changes is what the number buys. There is no château taken whole, no drive from an airport, no season. There is a first arrondissement address, a kitchen that has held a Michelin star since before you were born, and rooms that photograph the same in January as in June.

The Palais Garnier is a different order. The building supplies its rooms and nothing else, and everything a wedding needs arrives on a lorry and leaves the same night. Budget from €1,000,000 all-in, and a wedding that also takes the auditorium for a private performance is a different order again.

What moves the number at the hotels is the salon combination and the running time. A wedding that ends in the Salon Vendôme at the Ritz or the Salon Roland Bonaparte at the Shangri-La is two hires rather than one, because the room without a curfew is a second contract. Budget for it early instead of discovering it late.

Five venues take a full wedding in the city and they are not versions of one another.

Two are palace hotels that sell salons rather than a buyout. One is a working opera house. One is a private club in a hôtel particulier off the Champs-Élysées. One is a museum that opens after hours.

Two things separate them, and neither is in the photographs.

The first is the hire structure. A hotel prices its salons and its catering and adds nothing else; a monument prices the hire, adds a percentage of the catering, and supplies none of the furniture; a museum charges a fee and hands you an empty building.

The second is the curfew, which in Paris belongs to the room rather than to the address. Soundproofed basement salons run without one. Historic rooms with bedrooms above them come down earlier. The monuments end on the theatre’s or the museum’s own schedule.

Pick the venue for the guest list and the hire structure, then design the evening around the room that has no curfew.

A palace hotel on Place Vendôme with 142 rooms, seven salons and a 500-square-metre private garden behind the façade. The Salon Vendôme sits below ground, seats 187 or 121 once a dance floor goes in, and carries no curfew.

Read the full Ritz Paris wedding guide for capacity by salon, what the hire covers and what it costs.

Prince Roland Bonaparte’s 1896 hôtel particulier on Avenue d’Iéna, 100 rooms, three first-floor salons listed as Historical Monuments, and a soundproofed second-floor ballroom in what used to be the stables. The Eiffel Terrace faces the tower across the rooftops of the sixteenth.

Read the full Shangri-La Paris wedding guide for capacity by salon, what the hire covers and what it costs.

Charles Garnier’s opera house on Place de l’Opéra, its foyers and staircase hired for the evening while the theatre’s own performance schedule holds every other date. The Grand Foyer with the Avant-Foyer seats 700 for dinner; the Grand Staircase carries the ceremony with guests looking down from the landings above.

Read the full Palais Garnier wedding guide for capacity by room, what the hire covers and what it costs.

A hôtel particulier at 9 Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, seat of the Cercle France-Amériques since 1929. Point-de-Hongrie parquet, gilded boiseries, a fresco ceiling and a former basement bathhouse under arcades. Six event salons across two floors, with catering brought in from Butard Enescot rather than a hotel kitchen of its own.

The Salon Washington on the ground floor is the largest: 93 square metres, 80 seated for dinner, 150 for a cocktail, and 100 theatre-style for a ceremony. The Salon Franklin in the basement is the reason the venue works late: 130 square metres, 75 seated, and no constraint on time or volume because there is no bedroom above it and no neighbour beside it. The Salons Bolivar, Lafayette, Montcalm and Jefferson take the smaller and secondary spaces from 25 to 60 seated.

No bedrooms, so the accommodation is a separate exercise across the palace hotels of the eighth. That is an advantage rather than a limitation at this address, because the George V, the Plaza Athénée, the Bristol and the Crillon are all within ten minutes on foot.

The trade against a palace hotel is the caterer. Butard Enescot are the house partner and the choice is not open, which is a constraint we take seriously in the design and a saving we take seriously in the number.

The Hôtel Biron in the seventh arrondissement, and the three-hectare Sculpture Garden behind it with The Thinker, The Gates of Hell and the roses laid out around them. A wedding here is staged inside a museum after it has closed to the public.

The rules are strict and worth stating first. Weddings happen on Mondays, when the museum is closed, or on other days between 19h and midnight, including load-in and load-out. The museum will not sign a contract with a private client; the booking is held by an event planner on their behalf, which is a decision the museum has made rather than a workaround.

The Hôtel Biron indoors holds 80 for a seated dinner, an intimate scale that photographs like a private residence rather than an institution. The Sculpture Garden holds 250 for a standing reception or 150 seated with a marquee, and the ceremony against the Rodins is what a wedding here is for. Budget from €200,000 all-in for a small wedding inside, and from €500,000 for a full garden wedding once the marquee, lighting, catering and production sit on top of the museum’s own fee.

No, in almost every case. French law places the civil ceremony at the mairie, and one of you must have lived in the arrondissement for at least 30 days before the banns are published. That rules out the overwhelming majority of foreign couples, and no venue in Paris can change it.

What happens instead is straightforward. Couples marry legally at home, usually in a registry office some weeks before, and hold a symbolic ceremony in Paris that carries the whole emotional weight of the day. Guests seldom know the difference and it changes nothing about how the wedding is planned.

Religious ceremonies are a separate question. A Catholic wedding in a Paris parish requires a completed civil marriage first, and the parish will ask for the certificate. A ceremony at the American Cathedral on Avenue George V or at the American Church on Quai d’Orsay is a common alternative for a British or American couple who want a religious service on the day itself, and neither imposes a residency requirement.

If a legally binding ceremony at the venue matters to you more than the location does, London or Rome is the better city and we will say so.

This is the part of a Paris wedding that surprises people, and it is decided at the room rather than the venue.

The city itself imposes no wedding curfew. What stops the music is either the bedroom above the room or the contract with the building, and the two behave very differently.

A soundproofed ballroom below ground, with no bedroom above it and no neighbour beside it, runs without a curfew. Three of the venues on this page hold one: the Salon Vendôme at the Ritz, the Salon Roland Bonaparte at the Shangri-La, and the Salon Franklin at the Cercle France-Amériques. Build the evening so the party arrives in that room rather than ending somewhere else, and the night stops having a deadline.

A historic salon with bedrooms above it does the opposite. Amplified music has to come down early in the evening, and no relationship with the venue is going to change what the bedroom guests are entitled to. The Ritz’s Grand Jardin, the Shangri-La’s first-floor listed salons and Eiffel Terrace, and any hotel room with a floor above it all sit in this category.

The monuments run on a third clock entirely. The Palais Garnier’s finish time is written into the hire contract and set by whatever performance the theatre is putting on the following day; the Musée Rodin closes at midnight regardless of what the wedding wants. Both are non-negotiable, and both are the first thing to settle in the timeline because every other hour of the evening is measured backward from them.

Most venues also run a decibel limiter set around 90 to 95 dB(A). A limiter is not a curfew; it caps the band’s peak all night, and it belongs in the sound designer’s brief before the band is chosen.

Paris is the easiest destination on the list to arrive at and the hardest to move around inside. That trade shapes the transport plan.

Charles de Gaulle (CDG) is the airport for long-haul guests without exception. It is the only Paris airport with the full complement of direct routes from the US, from Asia and from most of Africa, and it sits 45 to 60 minutes from the centre depending on traffic. Orly (ORY) is 30 to 45 minutes and carries more of Europe and North Africa, and it is closer to the sixteenth than to Place Vendôme. Paris-Le Bourget is Europe’s busiest business aviation airport, 25 to 30 minutes from most of the venues on this list, and it is where the private aircraft land.

Eurostar from London St Pancras reaches Gare du Nord in a little over two hours, and for a British guest list it beats flying. Book the terminal transfers rather than assuming taxis will be there. St Pancras and Gare du Nord both queue an hour on a Friday afternoon.

Inside Paris the wedding does not need transfers. Guests walk between the hotels of the eighth, the first, the sixteenth or the ninth, take a taxi across when the weather is against them, or use the metro if they enjoy it. That is the whole logistical argument for a Paris wedding, and it is what makes a hundred guests at the Ritz easier to plan than forty at a château fifty minutes outside the city.

There is no wedding season in Paris, and that is the argument for the city over any of its alternatives.

Every venue on this page has an indoor room that photographs the same in February as in June. The palace hotels are heated, the listed salons carry their own light from six-metre windows and painted ceilings, and the monuments arrive with lighting rigs that make a January dinner look like a July one. Couples who cannot move their month often find Paris easier than a château for exactly this reason.

The terraces and gardens are the seasonal part. The Ritz’s Grand Jardin, the Shangri-La’s Eiffel Terrace, the Musée Rodin’s Sculpture Garden and Le Marois’s own courtyard are open from May to October and are worth building a summer date around rather than treating as a bonus. April and October both work, with the caveat that a cool evening moves the drinks indoors rather than compromising the ceremony.

Two weeks to avoid without a specific reason to be here. Fashion Week falls in late February and again in late September, and it books out the hotels of the first, the eighth and the sixteenth at rates that make a summer date look reasonable. The Roland-Garros fortnight at the end of May does the same to the sixteenth. Neither is a wedding constraint if you already have the hotel block held, but neither is worth landing on by accident either.

The venue almost never sleeps your whole wedding, and in Paris that is a feature.

The Ritz has 142 rooms and the Shangri-La 100. Neither will sell a full buyout even if you asked, so a wedding takes a room block rather than the building. What that means in practice on Place Vendôme, Avenue d’Iéna or the Champs-Élysées is that the overflow walks to another palace hotel in five to ten minutes, and the range of hotels within walking distance of every venue on this page is the widest of any city in Europe.

Plan for the majority of guests staying off the venue. Place Vendôme has the Ritz, the Costes, the Meurice and the Mandarin Oriental within four streets.

Avenue Montaigne and the Golden Triangle behind it hold the George V, the Plaza Athénée, the Bristol and the Prince de Galles. The sixteenth has the Shangri-La, the Peninsula and the Raphael. Book the couple and the immediate family in the venue and spread the rest across the two or three hotels that suit their taste and their budget.

We hold the blocks, publish one guest page with the options priced by tier, and brief every hotel on the timeline so the concierge desk gives the same directions to the ceremony.

The no-curfew room is where the night goes. The Ritz’s Salon Vendôme, the Shangri-La’s Salon Roland Bonaparte and Le Marois’s Salon Franklin all run without a fixed end time because they sit below ground with no bedroom above them. Build the evening so the party arrives there, and do not let dinner run so long that the room only gets ninety minutes of use.

The palace hotels do not sell buyouts. You are hiring salons inside a working hotel, and other guests will cross the lobby. That is the trade for the address and the price, and it is the sharpest difference between a Paris wedding and one at a château taken whole.

The monuments are load-in projects. The Palais Garnier and the Musée Rodin both supply the room and nothing else. Every table, chair, plate, cable and light arrives that afternoon and leaves the same night, inside a window the building sets. Plan the load-in before the design.

The kitchen is the hotel’s, or it is not. The Ritz and the Shangri-La cook everything themselves and will not accept an external caterer. The Cercle France-Amériques uses Butard Enescot and the choice is not open. The Palais Garnier and the Musée Rodin are on an approved-caterer list. Know which category the venue sits in before the tasting is booked.

Guests walk. Between the George V, the Plaza Athénée and the Bristol on Avenue Montaigne, or between the Ritz, the Meurice and the Costes on rue de Rivoli, a guest list can be spread across three hotels and everyone still arrives on foot. This is the single strongest logistical argument for the city.

Fashion Week is a real problem. Late February and late September. Hotel rooms triple in price and disappear anyway. Neither is a date to land on by accident.

Legal ceremonies happen at home. The French residency requirement rules almost every foreign couple out of the mairie, and the wedding you actually plan in Paris is a symbolic one. That is not a compromise; it is the whole point, because the ceremony you design has nothing legal to negotiate around.

Magic Day has been established in Paris at 63 Av. Franklin Delano Roosevelt since 2008. By appointment only.

Magic Day plans weddings across Paris at any scale, from a forty-guest evening in the Shangri-La’s Salon de Famille to seven hundred down the Grand Foyer of the Palais Garnier.

What a venue hires here is narrower than it looks. At the palace hotels you get the salons, the rooms, a kitchen and a sound system; at the monuments you get the empty rooms; at the Cercle France-Amériques you get the rooms and the house caterer. None of them gives you someone to plan the wedding. Design, catering coordination, production, entertainment, transfers and the room-by-room sequence that keeps the evening moving all sit with the planner, and in Paris so does the part nobody quotes for: threading a hundred people through a working hotel lobby twice in one evening without the wedding losing its shape.

There is a case for a planner who has worked here. The finish time is decided by the room rather than the arrondissement. The caterer choice is decided by the venue rather than by the couple.

The load-in is decided by the monument’s own schedule. And the guest list is spread across three hotels rather than one. Those are the four constraints that shape a Paris wedding, and every one of them is easier to design around than to discover.