Destination Wedding at Château du Grand Lucé
A serpentine table of candles in an orangerie, black tie on the gravel above a park in the Val de Loire, and a neon sign reading Karty Club over a dance floor at midnight. Kimi and Arty are Australian, they live in London, and they married in the middle of the French countryside because it was the one place everybody they love could reach.
They gave it three days: a welcome dinner on the Thursday, the wedding on the Friday, and a pool party on the Saturday for everyone still standing. Here is all of it, and the film.
A destination wedding comes down to one decision, and it is the venue. They chose Château du Grand Lucé, an eighteenth century château in the Sarthe, a château an hour further from Paris than Bouffémont, with a park around it and the whole domaine to themselves for the weekend, three hours from Paris and two from the coast. Their guests came from Australia, from England and from further, and nobody had to drive anywhere once they arrived.
What we love about this château wedding
- A welcome dinner in the orangerie on a serpentine table dressed in draped silk and candles
- Black tie, and a bridal party in black silk against a white satin gown
- An outdoor ceremony on the gravel, guests in black tie under white parasols
- White hydrangea everywhere, and nothing else in the flowers at all
- One long dinner table on the terrace, with the whole party at it
- A champagne tower, a neon Karty Club sign and sunglasses at midnight
- A third day at the pool, with monogrammed towels, straw hats and burgers at the end of it
The Venue: Château du Grand Lucé
They married in one of the most cinematic châteaux in France, and it is worth knowing what it is. Château du Grand Lucé stands in the village of Le Grand-Lucé, in the Sarthe, at the top of the Val de Loire: thirty-two hectares inside a medieval wall, nineteen rooms and suites, and a hotel that gives the whole domaine to one wedding at a time.
A château built in the 1760s
It was built between 1760 and 1764 for Baron Jacques Pineau de Viennay, who pulled down the château fort his family had bought in the village and put a neoclassical summer palace in its place. It is made of tuffeau, the creamy limestone quarried in the village itself, and laid out on a north-south axis that runs from the cour d'honneur at the front, through the middle of the château and straight out into the gardens behind. The hotel calls it one of the finest surviving examples of French neoclassical architecture, and standing in front of it you do not argue.
Its history is good company. The Baron's daughter filled the place with the Enlightenment, and the hotel names Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Grimm and Mozart among her guests. The walls of the Salon Chinois were painted by Jean-Baptiste Pillement, and the only other set like them is at Marie-Antoinette's Petit Trianon at Versailles. The château was a hospital for wounded British officers in the First World War, and in the Second it hid paintings from the Louvre in a cache under the stage of the theatre in the old stables. The American designer Timothy Corrigan bought it in 2003 and lived in it. Since 2017 it has been a hotel.
What the château offers a wedding
Nineteen rooms and suites is the number that shapes everything else: the people closest to you sleep in the château, and the weekend happens without a single transfer. Inside the wall there are the jardins à la française on the axis, a jardin anglais below them that keeps the afternoon sun, a potager that feeds the kitchen, a lake, meadows, and an oak forest with statues in it that were a gift from Louis XV.
- The ballroom, built in the former stables, with windows nearly four metres tall, velvet drapery, oak point de Hongrie floors and crystal chandeliers. It is why a February wedding works here as well as a July one.
- The orangerie, long and vaulted with stone arches and lanterns down the middle, citrus through the cold months and dinners through the warm ones. Thursday happened here.
- The spa, in what used to be the laundry, with garden views and a courtyard of its own.
- The pool, in the exotic garden, where Saturday happened.
- The food, which is the château's art de vivre made edible: Le Lucé, the restaurant in a garden-side salon, cooking out of the potager, and the bar beside it in the Baron's old chapel.
Getting there is easier than the map suggests. The hotel counts the train from Paris at fifty-five minutes, and by car it is about three hours, with the coast another two beyond it. Once your guests arrive, nobody moves a car again until Sunday.
How it photographs
Atmosphere is the rarest thing a venue can give a photographer, and this château has it in every room. The colours are deep, the ceilings run to four and a half metres and the windows nearly match them, so the light comes in from one side and rolls gently off across the floor. Put a couple a step in from a window and the room does the rest: the red billiard room under its tapestry, the green salon, the gilt mirrors that pass the light back. It is why these photographs look romantic and filmic rather than flat.
Outside, the gardens are symmetrical and the park is not, which gives you two completely different kinds of picture within a hundred metres. And the drone is worth having here, because the axis of the château only reads from above.
Day One: The Welcome Dinner in the Orangerie
The orangerie is a long vaulted room with stone arches and lanterns down the middle of it, and for the welcome dinner it held one table that wound the whole length of the floor like a river.
That table is the work of the textile artist Mia Sylvia Herrod, who draped it in raw silk that gathered along the top and then poured off both ends onto the gravel. It is savoir-faire rather than hire stock, and it shows in every frame. The rest of the decoration is pillar candles at several heights, the whole length of it, with the orangerie's own lanterns hanging above them. Linen, glass, candlelight and no flowers on the table at all, with black bentwood chairs down both sides.
That is a braver scheme than it reads. Drapery and candlelight give a photograph texture and a direction to look in, where a row of centrepieces usually gives it neither. We photographed the whole thing empty before a single guest came in, which is the only time you ever get it.
Before the guests arrived we stole Kimi and Arty for ten minutes upstairs. She wore a white satin slip dress, he wore a cream suit, and the salon did the rest: gilt mirror, a painted panel, and a window the height of the wall.
The guests came down through the garden at eight, and the first thing nearly all of them did was walk the length of the table before they sat down at it.
After that it was candlelight. The sky went out of the high windows over the next hour, the table became the brightest thing in the room, and the photographs from the second half of that dinner are all warm and candlelit and very close.
If you are planning a three day wedding, this is the evening to spend money on. It is the night everybody meets everybody, and by the ceremony the following afternoon a room full of strangers had turned into one wedding.
Day Two: Getting Ready in the Château
The morning belonged to the château. Kimi got ready upstairs with her friends around her, in a room with velvet curtains and a window the height of the wall, and when the gown went on the room went quiet for a second, the way it usually does. Her shoes were Jimmy Choo, pearls across the strap, waiting on a green velvet chair with the rings and a burgundy card in gold monogram.
Her dress carries the room, which is what a dress has to do in a château, with a train that takes up half the floor and not one sequin on it. Her bridesmaids wore black silk, a braver choice than it sounds and the best thing in the photographs: the black against her gown, and both of them against the panelling.
A tip from us, if you are choosing colours for a château: pick one and hold your nerve. The rooms are already doing a great deal.
Arty was getting ready on the other side of the château, and by the time we came through he and his groomsmen had taken over the billiard room: red walls, a tapestry, a chandelier and a whisky each. Eight men in black tie around a pool table is a photograph that takes itself, and we left them to it for twenty minutes and shot from the doorway.
The Ceremony at Château du Grand Lucé
They married just after five, outside on the gravel above the park, with the clipped topiary behind them and the countryside running away past the aisle. The guests sat in black tie under white parasols, ninety white circles above a lawn of black tie. It was an intimate ceremony and the vows were their own, said out loud between two great banks of white hydrangea.
The flowers were one thing in one colour. White hydrangea and ferns banked either side of the couple, the same white around the bar at the vin d'honneur, the same again down the middle of the dinner table, and nothing overhead: no arch, no installation, nothing hanging. Against a château this decorated, that restraint is the right call.
If you are planning a ceremony here, two things are worth knowing. The aisle faces away from the château, so the vows have the park behind them and the house is kept for the walk back. And the light on that terrace late in the afternoon is soft the whole way through, which is why every face in these photographs is open and easy.
Her father walked her down the gravel and handed her over. Afterwards they came back up the same aisle under a shower of petals, and the whole party cheered them down it.
Portraits of Love: Moments from a Destination Wedding
After the vows we took them away for twenty minutes. The hydrangeas were out along every path, the light was soft under the trees, and for the first time that day there was no one else in the frame.
That gap is the single easiest thing to build into a timeline and the first thing couples cut. Ask your planner for it.
None of this is improvised, and none of it is done to a couple either. We plan these twenty minutes with them months ahead, alongside the rest of the timeline: where in the garden to go, how long it takes to walk there, what the light will be doing by then, and what the two of them actually want out of it.
On the day we guide rather than pose. A word about where to stand, a suggestion about which way to walk, a hand for the train when it needs one, and then we leave them to each other. Kimi and Arty did the rest themselves, which is why they look like themselves. Two of the frames were taken from straight above, with the couple alone among the hydrangea beds.
The Cocktail Hour at Château du Grand Lucé
The vin d'honneur happened in the topiary garden: a white bar banked with hydrangea, champagne in tubs, and a wedding party that had clearly been waiting all afternoon to talk to each other.
This is the hour a wedding lets go. Jackets came off, bow ties loosened, a lawn game started up in the green walk, and ninety people who had been sitting still all afternoon spread out across the garden with a glass in their hand.
Nothing else was organised, and nothing else needed to be. Kimi and Arty stayed in the middle of it, and the two sides of a guest list that had flown in from opposite ends of the world got on with each other like a family that sees itself every summer. Somebody had the wedding date embroidered inside the lining of his jacket, and we only found it because he was laughing too hard to hold it closed.
This is the hour we watch the guests as closely as the couple. It is never in a running order, and it is always in the album.
Dinner at a Destination Wedding in Château du Grand Lucé
Dinner was one long table on the terrace, every guest along it, the château at one end and the park at the other. From above it is a single white line with ninety people down both sides of it.
There is no seating plan in the world that beats a single table: everybody can see everybody, the speeches have one audience, and when the napkins went up over their heads at the end of it, the whole thing went up at once.
The Celebration: Dancing at Château du Grand Lucé
Then the sun went down and the wedding turned into something else entirely. A champagne tower went up on a table in the hall, the spotlights came on, and a neon sign that read Karty Club lit the wall behind the dance floor.
Kimi changed into a short white dress and Arty into a white polo shirt, they both put sunglasses on indoors at eleven at night, and somebody produced an inflatable swan. This is the half of a wedding that never makes the mood board and always makes the album.
The cake came out under the neon, sugar roses and all, and they cut it wearing the sunglasses. After that it was the floor until the small hours: the groom in the air, the bride spinning her skirt in a ring of light, and the last of the guests still going when we packed the cameras away.
Day Three: The Pool Party
The third day is the one we would argue for hardest. Everybody is still there, nobody has anywhere to be, and the wedding turns back into a holiday with the two of them at the middle of it.
They called it Karty's Cabana: an arched white stand beside the pool stacked with straw hats, tote bags and towels embroidered Karty Club, Loire 25, and the neon sign from the dance floor moved out to hang over the orangerie door with ferns and white flowers under it.
Then the pool: loungers, parasols, an inflatable swan, and guests in colours that nobody wore on the wedding day. Later, burgundy tables went out on the lawn with flowers down the middle, and the kitchen sent out burgers and fries to eat with champagne, which is the correct way to end three days in a château.
Before any of this: the planning
We are not a supplier who turns up on the Friday. It starts with a long conversation, months out, about what the two of you actually want out of the weekend and what you would rather never look at again. After that we stay in the planning: we read the running order every time it changes, we tell the planner where we need to stand and when, and we say the unglamorous things out loud.
Light the candles half an hour earlier than the caterer plans to. Keep twenty minutes after the ceremony that belongs to nobody but you. Put the speeches while the light is still on the tables, and they are photographed in gold instead of tungsten. Tell us which four people you would be upset not to have a photograph of. How we work with a couple is on our about page, and how to book us answers the rest.
By the time we walked into the orangerie on the Thursday we knew the shape of all three days, which is why we could give the first hour of it to an empty table.
If you are bringing everybody across the world for a weekend, our advice from this one is short. Choose a château that sleeps your guests, because the day gets longer and better when nobody has to drive. Keep the flowers to one thing and let the rooms talk. And plan the second half properly: the sunglasses, the neon, the swan, whatever yours turns out to be, because that is the part people ring each other about afterwards.
The wedding team
- Location Château du Grand Lucé, the Sarthe, and its orangerie
- Photography and film Through The Glass Paris, stills and film
- Welcome dinner textiles Mia Sylvia Herrod
A château, three hours from Paris, and a guest list that flew a long way for it. There are more wedding stories to read, Château de Champlâtreux is the other château we would send you to look at, and when you have a date, tell us about it.
