Plan your wedding
Who can claim to know all the ins and outs of a reception, all the ways of organising a destination wedding - particularly in wedding venues in France, such as a chateau? The scope is enormous; the only limits are our imagination: age-old traditions, seduction flames, costumes and lights, food and wine, long nights and snow for winter weddings... A particularly romantic season for this French chateau, with a great offer and lower cost.
Château de Vallery, a wedding venue with accommodation, can explore ways of organising your destination wedding reception without necessarily the professional guidance of a wedding planner in France. Plan your wedding days as a journey, a journey through time and space. Time will stand still exclusively for your celebration, for a spiritual journey into the pale light of dawn. The estate is yours alone.
Let us not forget that before the wheel, man invented masks and celebrations! The principle of a "roving" French wedding reception, wending its way around the chateau grounds, will surely appeal, encountering pockets of heavenly fragrance - lily, fig, teak, rose and jasmine – and flickers of fire in the night.
The following tips will help you choose the right chateau for your wedding. They offer a suggested programme for your fairytale wedding in France, extend a warm welcome to wedding planners, and provide plans of the halls and interactive seating plans to be downloaded, as well as thorough information on bedrooms at the chateau and accommodation nearby.
How do I organise my wedding in France?
THE DAY BEFORE
First step in your wedding planning: come to the estate with your guests on the eve of your big day and settle into the chateau's historical rooms. As afternoon fades, taste fine wines in the vaulted 12th-century cellars. When dusk falls, savour a tagine together in the pavilion with its big pool. Then, in the lamplight and fragrances of the Orient, enjoy mint tea, honeyed pastries and maybe some belly dancing...
PRELUDES TO THE WEDDING
Make yourselves at home! Luxuriate in a relaxing bath. Spend time with your guests, adding the finishing touches to floral arrangements and seating plans, or getting the bridesmaids and page boys ready. A hairdresser and make-up artist await the bride as photographer and video cameraman capture the moment. Take time to enjoy this chateau, Burgundy and France.
THE WEDDING DAY: THE CEREMONY
For their romantic wedding vows, some may choose the church opposite the chateau on the edge of the forest, with the mausoleum of the Princes and Princesses of Condé. For others, a flower-laden chuppah in the Rose Garden. Or why not the orchard? Or by the big Buddha beneath his tree? Or at the foot of the sycamore with seven trunks? Spirituality is the order of the day.
FRENCH DRINKS AND DINNER
Your wedding planner or caterer will have set up buffet tables in the Arbour garden and in the Music Room Music to match the bride and groom floats over the grounds, interspersed with numbers by a jazz-band playing in the dovecot. Later, a traditional French candlelight dinner in the Salle des Tentures with its trompe-l'oeil in sumptuous fabrics measuring over 500m2. In the grounds, a thousand torches flicker until dawn for your only dream wedding.
THE NIGHT OF YOUR FRENCH WEDDING
After dinner, everyone steps out into the grounds or onto the front steps for a firework show set to music, or a huge bonfire. The final tableau stars the wedding cake, paraded into the Grande Galerie, and a pyramid of a Champagne produced in the East of France that marks the opening of the ball. Music playing in the grounds drifts to the very fringes of the surrounding forest. The chateau is for you alone, exclusively.
DAY AFTER
Nights at the chateau are mellow, in rooms and suites preserved from the harshness of modernity. The day after your wedding, savour breakfast around the big pool enveloped in fragrances rising up from the gardens. Stroll through the forest or around the ramparts. An opportunity for your guests to visit Burgundy, Paris or any other region of France, depending on the season you choose for your wedding.
Valuable help for getting married in a chateau in France.
