Tag Archive for: weddings in france

The beautiful countryside of the Southwest of France was the setting for Emmie & Jon’s French château wedding. The globe-trotting couple has lived in Beijing, Montreal and San Fransisco, but their true love is for France. The first time they visited our beautiful country together, there was an immediate connection. They kept coming back, and each time it felt more magical. It felt natural for them to host their wedding in the country they loved so much.The relaxed yet elegant château wedding venue they chose is located in a region known for it’s food and wine. The rambling property is surrounded by vineyards which produce wine as well as the region’s famous Armagnac. The château also has the feel of a family home with plenty of accommodations on site, so friends and family were able to stay together and enjoy the grounds for the four days of festivities.The château and grounds have several spaces perfect for a wedding weekend of festivities, which allowed us to create a different ambiance for each event: beautiful ivy-covered courtyards, a rehabilitated barn with two big high-ceilinged rooms, a swimming pool, and a massive garden.The bride was stunning in an elegant strapless Vera Wang gown and loose chignon updo, and the groom dapper in a black tuxedo and velvet slippers. After the “I dos” the bride added chic accessories for her reception look, donning puffy tulle sleeves, golden dangly earrings and letting her hair down.

The floral decor was inspired by fall colors with warm tones mixed with greenery. The bouquets, arch and flower arrangements all had a lot of texture, with an elegant combination of fresh and dried flowers.For the cocktail, we invited guests to another part of the garden, where they could spread out between the trees and relax on lounge furniture set up on the grass. A live band played folk and pop music to add to the perfect late summer ambiance as the sun set on the vines behind the domain.

The dinner took place in the main courtyard, under garlands of lights which created a warm and intimate ambiance. The couple enjoyed their meal surrounded by friends and family and their moving speeches. After champagne flowed for dessert, the bride and groom surprised their guests with fireworks, before leading them to dance late into the night.

Contact us to see how we can help plan your own French countryside château wedding!

As seen on Magnolia Rouge.

Planning & design: @feteinfrance
Venue: @chateaudemalliac
Flowers: @fleurs-de-mars
Photographer: @marionhweddings
Videographer: @moonandbackco
Hair stylist: @ciaracoiffure
Makeup artist: @sannimakeupartist
Caterer: @lacostetraiteur
Tableware and rentals: @maison_options
Band: @chelseychantelle

Our hearts go out to all of the couples who have made the decision to postpone their destination wedding in France because of Covid-19. Many couples have the weight of changing their date, and all of the work that represents, solely on their shoulders. This can add to the stress of an already stressful situation!

You might not have thought about having a full-service wedding planner as part of your vendor team because you planned to do much of the work yourself, and perhaps for budgetary reasons. It’s true that we’re best known for our Full Wedding Planning services, however we do offer a variety of Partial Planning services depending on your needs. We also are happy to announce a new offer, in response to the couples who have had to postpone their date.

Here’s a quick recap of our Partial Wedding Planning services:

Planning Support
Hourly packages (1/3/5 hours) which provides access our expertise in wedding planning. We discuss your planning concerns and offer best practices and vendor recommendations. Our hourly planning support can also be used to conduct research, request and review quotes and manage vendor communication. From 300€ per hour.

Month-of Coordination
This service starts 30 days out from your wedding date and allows you to hand off the project to an experienced coordinator. We review the schedule of the day – or help you create one – and double check all of the vendors and services that have been booked. On the wedding day, a team of coordinators will be on site to oversee that all goes according to plan, freeing you up to be fully present with your friends and family. From 3500€.

New! Postponed Wedding Support
This service is for any couple who has postponed to a later date, whether it’s a Fall 2020 wedding or a 2021 wedding. We provide support and guidance as you update your vendors due to the date change, help put into place any vendors not yet contracted or find replacements for any who are not available on the new date, set the logistics plan and orchestrate the on-site coordination so you can fully enjoy your day. Contact us for more information!

Many countries around the world are more than a month into confinement, and it seems that it’s having the desired effect of flattening the curve. We can be cautiously optimistic but the reality is that it will still be a little while before things are “back to normal”.

We’re still facing a lot of uncertainty, but couples who make it through confinement are coming out even stronger. And if the trend we’re seeing in China holds true for the rest of the world, 2021 is shaping up to be a particularly busy year for weddings.

We’ve shared some advice on postponing your wedding and while some couples have opted to shift their date to later in 2020 or even 2021, there are still some couples who are holding out hope that they will be able to maintain their late summer wedding as planned.

We wanted to share some additional advice on planning your wedding amidst the ongoing crisis. Our recommendations come from having 14 years of wedding planning to our credit, but since every situation is unique, only you can know the right decision for your celebration.

Holding out hope for a 2020 wedding

We completely understand if you’re holding out hope for your original 2020 date. Many countries are expecting encouraging news in May, which will give more visibility on when businesses will be able to open to the public, and when international travel will be allowed.

The advice we’re giving to couples in this situation is to set a deadline of at least 2 months out in order to give yourself (and your planner) enough time to get the rest of the planning finalized, and your guests enough time to arrange their travel.

Postponing to a 2021 wedding

If you’ve made the decision to postpone your wedding to 2021, you’ve likely already made a majority of the design and vendor decisions. Most vendors are applying deposits to the new date and are not charging change fees. However, if you’ve already set the design but decide to go in a completely new direction, there may be a cost for the extra work. Along with shoring up the new date with your previously booked venue and vendors, you’ll also want to get any other remaining vendors secured for the new date.

Planning for a 2021 wedding

The majority of our postponed weddings are being shifted to 2021, mostly into May and June. So if you have your heart set on a weekend wedding in Spring/Summer 2021, we encourage you to get the planning started as soon as possible.

The first step of planning your wedding is getting the venue and date set. With the expected swell of couples for 2021 and the current international travel restrictions, we’re encouraging couples to think a bit differently about venue search and selection. In-person visits may not be possible in the immediate term, so consider doing a virtual/video tour with your top picks to get a feel for the spaces before booking.

If planning site visits is an essential part of your wedding planning experience, this will likely push your decision date out. In order to increase your chances of booking in your preferred month we recommend considering a weekday wedding. As celebrated event designer David Beahm noted in a recent Harper’s Bazaar article, “Perhaps Wednesday weddings are going to be the new thing for a while, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Weekend, Wednesday or any other day of the week, we offer different levels of support depending on your planning needs. We would love to hear about your vision for your day and see how we can help with your plans!

 

Updated on April 14, 2020

Greetings from (continued) confinement in France! I am riding out the lockdown in the countryside of Brittany, grateful to be in a house with a lawn as opposed to my Parisian apartment.

We’re going through a scary and uncertain time and there’s unfortunately very little we can control right now, but there is a lot of information we can gather to arm ourselves as best possible once the situation gets a bit clearer.

The news cycle is spinning so fast that it’s not easy to make heads or tails of what to do. At this point we’re looking at each of our upcoming weddings and evaluating on a case-by-case basis. We’re here providing support to all of our couples, collecting as much information as we can and updating as the situation changes.

If you’ve been planning your own wedding and have been in direct contact with your vendors, I wanted to share some advice on how we’ve gone about things:

1. Review your venue and vendor’s postponement and force majeure policy as stated in their contract. Review your wedding insurance policy (if you have one). *It’s not entirely clear on how insurers are viewing the pandemic, and it may not fall under force majeure, so it’s always best to contact them directly to clarify.

2. Reach out to your venue and vendors to understand what adjustments are being made to their policy in light of the COVID-19 emergency. If you have a wedding planner, they are here to help facilitate these discussions. Here at Fête in France, our standard contract has a penalty clause in the event of a change in date or venue, however given the extraordinary circumstances we are waiving any change fees.

Once you’ve collected the above information:

3. If your wedding is between now and early July, you are likely in decision-making mode vs. wait-and-see mode. Time is of the essence, especially if any guests will be travelling, so you may choose to send out communication to your guests without yet having a date rescheduled. That said, if at all possible, have your new date set before communicating with guests – it will save you a step down the line and will be appreciated by any guests who need to rebook travel!

4. If your wedding is in mid-July or later, we recommend waiting until mid-May to understand how the situation evolves and reassessing then. If you still feel strongly about postponing, the same advice applies: if possible have your new date set before communicating with guests.

We know this is a stressful moment and it can be difficult to keep emotions at bay. The people surrounding you – your fiancé(e), your wedding party, your family and your key wedding vendors – are here to support you and guide you, and can’t wait to be part of your wedding, whenever it may be.

You’re engaged! Amid the whirlwind of all of the wedding possibilities, the idea of a wedding in France pops up: an elegant Paris wedding, or a romantic château wedding, or a relaxed countryside wedding… Then you wonder if you can really make this dream work. And you take to the internet to start looking into how to plan a wedding in France.

The search often begins with French wedding venues – the where of it seems like a good place to start. When you’re doing a first dive into venue search, it’s easy to get swept away by visuals or submerged by the daunting task of sifting through different websites, but it’s hard to know the what to really look for .

And what if the best way to the where and an understanding of the what started with the who?

After an exasperating or frustrating start to their venue search our couples often are so excited to find us. And learn that we’re native (American!) English speakers. And that we’ve been wedding planning for a while now (more than 5 years… more than 10 years…) creating close to 350 weddings of every shape and size, including some very beautiful and logistically complex celebrations. This depth and breadth of experience helps us navigate you through the planning process with ease, and allows us to keep things cool, calm and on track.

We’d love to hear from you and help you figure out the what and the where of your wedding!

 

We’re delighted to have this wedding featured on Carats and Cake and it was just the push we needed to write the next chapter of this exceptional 4-day wedding weekend. It was easy to find inspiration for the rehearsal dinner when the groom is originally from the Lone Star state and the bride is a champion horserider and manages a ranch outside of Fort Worth. After Day One’s “White Nights” theme Welcome Party, we headed deep in the heart of Texas for a rehearsal dinner bbq on Day Two.

We knew we needed to build all of the reception spaces, and that there would be a main tent for the wedding and brunch, and another tent for the rehearsal dinner. We wanted to make sure the feel of the rehearsal dinner was different but still coherent with the rest of the structures that would be on the property. Tipi tents were a perfect solution for both the rehearsal dinner and tent village we built to host some of the wedding guests.

The tipi structure hit just the right note of rustic and the design we selected with Madame Artisan Fleuriste made it festive, pretty and inviting. Details like horseshoe escort cards (collected from the bride’s ranch, naturally), state of Texas shaped cookies and a University of Texas groom’s cake. And what would a Texas-themed rehearsal dinner be without barbecue? The team from Melt totally delivered on the true Texas bbq experience, hanging out by their custom made smoker under a popup tent to keep dry. The native Texan and Paris-based smokemaster wowed the crowd, many of whom said it was the best bbq they had ever eaten!

Florals: Madame Artisan Fleuriste | Tipi Tent: Eventipi | Rentals: Options & Vaisselle Vintage | Catering: Melt and Potel & Chabot | Photo: Joel Serrato | Video: Studio Artifice | Hair & Makeup: Harold James | Signage: Studio French Blue | Custom napkins: For Your Party | Cookies & Cake: Synie’s | Wedding Entertainment: Elan Artists | Design & Planning: Fête in France

Color
Blush, nude, and ivory will always have their place in wedding decor, but the 2019 wedding trend we’re most excited about is color! Inspired by runway set design as well as interior design, we’re seeing boldly-colored flowers work their way into wedding floral design and rich jewel tones into tableware and rentals.


Blue and white
A welcome change from the classic white or gold-rimmed tableware, the blue and white motifs we’re seeing are both a modern and romantic twist for your wedding tablescape.


Pampa Grass

Pampa grass and dried flowers are changing up the traditional textures we’ve seen in wedding floral design. These materials can quickly veer into a bohemian vibe, so if you’re planning a more sophisticated wedding, be sure to incorporate some rich and glamorous blooms such as roses and orchids.

The elegant wedding weekend in Burgundy started with a welcome party two days before the big day. The theme was “White Nights”, the famous (at least to the father of the bride) 80’s movie featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines. Guests were instructed to wear white, and the color palette for the decor was inspired by the colors of the summer night sky in Saint Petersburg.

As you probably know by now, the weather did not at all cooperate. The party, which was supposed to take place around the château’s beautiful pool, was moved inside the main tent. Despite the change of location, guests had a fantastic time and most importantly were warm and dry, with plenty of delicious food and drink.

Florals: Madame Artisan Fleuriste | Wedding Tent: Barnum Events | Rentals: Options & Vaisselle Vintage | Catering: Potel & Chabot | Photo: Joel Serrato | Video: Studio Artifice | Hair & Makeup: Harold James | Signage: Studio French Blue | Custom napkins: For Your Party | Wedding Entertainment: Elan Artists | Design & Planning: Fête in France

 

2018 gave us incredible summer weather – even in places that have a bit of a reputation for being rainy. So it was with great delight that for L&A’s Normandy summertime wedding we had an abosolutely perfect day.

Preparations took place at the chic seaside Grand Hotel in Cabourg and then guests were brought inland to a beautiful private garden tended by the indomitable Madame & Monsieur Noppe. Their gardens, a labor of love over the past +25 years, was the site of the ceremony. During the planning, we had spent hours one day searching out the perfect spot based on the amount of space needed, the position of the sun and the amount of shade!

Guests enjoyed another part of the gardens during the cocktail hour and were then led to the rustic-chic reception space, where beautiful tables set with Lily Paloma’s gorgeous centerpieces brought the garden feel inside. A gourmet meal was served including the Norman traditions of a trou normand (palette cleanser) of apple sorbet and apple brandy, and of course a delicious selection of cheeses. Given the couple’s backgrounds, American (on the bride’s side) and French (on the groom’s side), they had not one, but two wedding cakes: a tiered wedding cake, with sugarpaste decoration inspired by the floral motif on the bride’s dress; and a traditional French croquembouche, or tower of cream-puffs held together with caramelized sugar and always presented with sparklers and great fanfare!

The couple deeply wanted to encourage conversation between the two sides of the family, so to overcome the language barrier there were two interpreters present at the wedding to translate the speeches in real time and help facilitate conversation with the guests. The couple also had the wish to have dancing take place outside. Any open-air plan is sure to make a wedding planner nervous – even moreso in a region that’s known for being green and lush (=rainy!) Fortunately it was clear, sunny and warm in the days leading up and on the day, allowing the dancefloor and band to be set up under the stars.

The wedding day was just one of three days of celebrations organized for the couple and their guests. To kick things off, a welcome dinner was planned at a Michelin-starred restaurant in the charming town of Beuvron. And to cap off the festivities a next-day brunch took place in the elegant ballroom of the Grand Hotel. All in all a perfect wedding weekend for this lovely Franco-American couple!

Florals: Lily Paloma | Rentals: Options | Photo: Ian Holmes | Video: BKT Films | Hair & Makeup: Sanni Sorma | Wedding Dress: Monique Lhuillier | Celebrant: Love Gracefully | Invitations: 5×7 Designs | Wedding menus & Calligraphy: Studio French Blue | Cake: Synie’s | Wedding Entertainment: Jazz Around Midnight | Design & Planning: Fête in France

   

We’re always curious as to how our couples find us – sometimes it’s through a simple google search, or via a wedding blog feature – more and more it’s through Instagram. But we’re always the most excited when they come to us on recommendation from venues or vendors we’ve worked with, or from former clients. And so it was that Constance and Nick contacted us for their chateau wedding in Burgundy.

We’re starting off with a post about the wedding day, which was on the third of a spectacular four-day wedding weekend. By this time, guests had gotten to know each other and were used to the less-than-ideal meteorological conditions. As with the previous days, back-up plans had to be called on (yes, the gorgeous ceremony setting was a plan B!)  But as with the previous days, the sunny disposition of the bride & groom and the warmth of their families and friends more than made up for a bit of rain.

For more of the story, check out our feature on Style Me Pretty and stay tuned for future blog posts!

Florals: Madame Artisan Fleuriste | Wedding Tent: Barnum Events | Rentals: Options & Vaisselle Vintage | Catering: Potel & Chabot | Photo: Joel Serrato | Video: Studio Artifice | Hair & Makeup: Harold James | Wedding Dress: Pronovias Atelier | Celebrant: Love Gracefully | Invitations & Calligraphy: Studio French Blue | Cake: Synie’s | Wedding Entertainment: Elan Artists | Design & Planning: Fête in France