Indulge in Opulence: French Destination Wedding at Château de Champlâtreux
A mariachi band on the lawn of an 18th century French château, a groom arriving on horseback, and fireworks that belonged to the whole country rather than to them: not the most obvious combination. For Sandy and Adrien it made perfect sense.
She wanted a French château, the tall windows and the gravel and that gorgeous late light on old stone. He wanted the wedding he grew up with, the one where the band comes across the garden in the middle of the afternoon and nobody is allowed to sit down after midnight.
They got both, at Château de Champlâtreux, an hour north of Paris, over two days in July. We photographed all of it, from the boat on the first evening to the last dance on the second, and this is the day as we saw it from behind the camera.
What we love about this château wedding
- A welcome dinner on the Seine that ended under the fireworks of the 14th of July
- A first look with her father in front of a wall of roses, before anybody else saw the dress
- Adrien arriving for his own first look on a chestnut horse
- Two ceremonies in one afternoon: a village church, then an arch of roses on the château lawn
- A mariachi band, dancers inside giant transparent balls, a fire dancer and ballerinas in lit tutus
- La Víbora de la Mar at midnight, danced under the bride’s five-metre veil
Day One: A Welcome Dinner on the Seine, Under the Fireworks of the 14th of July
It began on the water. Their guests had flown in from Mexico and from Texas, and instead of gathering everybody in a room, Sandy and Adrien put them all on a boat and pushed out into the Seine. If you’re planning a welcome dinner in Paris, this is the one we’d copy.
It happened to be the 14th of July, which in France is the one evening the whole country is already celebrating something else. Nobody had planned it that way. The guests came up on deck with a glass in their hand, the sun went down behind the bridges, and the monuments slid past as though they’d been hired for the evening.
Sandy wore a short white dress with a beautiful bow at the back, the sort of thing you pick when you know the real dress is waiting for tomorrow. Her bridesmaids came in blue, red and orange, and every time they stood together the deck turned into a paint box.
At ten the Eiffel Tower started to sparkle, the way it does on the hour, and for five minutes the conversation on that boat simply stopped. You can plan a wedding down to the minute, but you can’t plan how that feels.
A boat on the Seine is a hard thing to photograph, by the way, and a wonderful one. The deck moves, the light changes every time you pass under a bridge, and there is nowhere to stand that is not in somebody’s photograph. We work close on an evening like this, with one of us ahead of the couple and one behind, and we let the city do the rest.
Then the fireworks. Paris gives the whole sky to the 14th of July, and that year it went up while Sandy and Adrien stood on the deck with their families around them, heads back, saying nothing.
We’ve photographed a lot of welcome dinners. Not one of them has ended like that, and honestly, we don’t expect another one to!
Day Two: Why They Chose a Château an Hour North of Paris
The next morning everybody drove north out of the city, and Champlâtreux appeared at the end of its own avenue, the way these beautiful houses love to. You hear the guests go quiet in the cars behind you.
The first thing we do at a house like this is walk it: which rooms have north light at eleven, which windows go gold at nine, where the sun will be standing when the ceremony starts. Twenty minutes with nobody in the frame saves an hour later, and it tells you which two or three places the day should happen in.
It isn’t the château everyone has heard of, and that’s part of why we love shooting here. It went up in the 18th century and it kept that century’s proportions, so the rooms are tall and calm and they need very little help from a florist. Château du Grand Lucé does the same thing further south, if you’re looking. The difference is the hour: Champlâtreux is close enough to Paris that your guests don’t spend their morning on a motorway.
Getting Ready in the Château’s Pale Green Salon
Sandy spent the morning in the pale green salon upstairs, in a ruffled tulle robe, while somebody pinned gold branches and leaves through her hair and her bridesmaids talked over each other in two languages. You could hear them from the staircase.
We asked for one thing that morning and it is the thing we always ask for: put the dress near the window and keep the room as it is. Boiserie that colour throws a soft green back into the light, and against it ivory lace stops looking flat. Everything else in there, the bags and the hairdryers and the coffee cups, we simply framed out.
The dress came from Bridal Boutique Lewisville: off the shoulder, floral appliqué across the bodice, and a cathedral train so long it took four of them, kneeling, to lay it out on the parquet. Jimmy Choo shoes with a pearl at the centre. And a long plain veil, because everything else was already saying plenty.
How Adrien’s Morning Sounded Rather Different
Downstairs the noise was completely different. Adrien got dressed in the library with five friends fussing over his waistcoat, and then they carried an oversized bottle of champagne out onto the grass and opened it there, which told us everything we needed to know about how this evening was going to go.
The blue suit is Creation Morgan. Every man in the party wore gold cufflinks with his own initials on them, and they lined up to show us, sleeves out, like a row of schoolboys. We love a detail like that.
The First Look She Gave Her Father First
Before Adrien saw her, Sandy wanted her father to.
They built a wall of roses for it, blush and cream and burgundy with their initials picked out in the dark ones, and stood him on the black and white marble with his back turned. He couldn’t keep still. She came across the floor behind him in the whole dress, somebody said his name, and he turned around.
He got about half a word out, then held her face in both hands and gave up on the rest.
This is the sort of minute we plan our own morning around. One of us stood where he would turn, close enough for his face, and one stayed back with the whole hallway and the rose wall in the frame, because you only get it once and the wide one is the photograph they will print. If you are wondering whether to do a first look with your dad: do it. If we could keep only a handful of photographs from this wedding, they’d be from that minute.
And Then the Groom Arrived on a Horse
Adrien’s entrance was a different kind of theatre. He’d told her he had something planned, and then he came up the gravel in front of the château on a chestnut horse, in the blue suit, at a walk, enjoying every second of it. A horse! Nobody warned us either.
Sandy came down the steps to meet him with the train pouring behind her, and the two of them stood there holding the reins together, laughing at how ridiculous and how perfect it was. Neither of them said much. They didn’t need to.
An arrival like that is one take. We put ourselves at the bottom of the steps with the whole façade behind him, because a horse in front of a château is a frame you do not crop, and only came close once he had stopped. If you are planning an entrance, tell your photographer the route beforehand. We would rather know than guess.
Two Ceremonies in One Afternoon: a Village Church and the Château Lawn
They married twice that afternoon: once for their families and their faith, and once for the day the two of them had been drawing in their heads for a year. Why choose, when you can have both? If your families want two different weddings, this is how you give them one lovely day.
The first was in the village church, a small one dressed simply in red and white. Her father walked her up the aisle past every person they love, and the room made that sound a church makes when everybody draws breath at the same moment. Adrien watched her the whole way and didn’t blink once.
Two ceremonies in an afternoon is really two different jobs. A village church is dark and you work quietly at the edges of it, no flash, no walking about, everything on the faces. An hour later you are on a lawn in full July sun, which is the opposite problem: you put the couple with their backs to the light so it lands in their hair, and you keep the guests out of the hard shadow.
The second was outside, on the lawn in front of the house, and it was stunning. A white aisle ran over the grass between gold chairs, and at the end of it stood an arch of blush and cream roses with pampas grass pushed through, big enough to frame the whole façade behind it.
Violinists played them in. Behind the last row a painter worked at her easel through the whole ceremony, so by the time the rings were on there was a canvas of the afternoon as well as a film of it. What a thing to take home. Then the petals came down on the two of them and the quiet part of the day was over.
How a Mariachi Band Changed the Whole Afternoon
What came next was Adrien’s half of the wedding, and it arrived across the lawn in white shirts and sombreros. A mariachi band at a French château isn’t a sound these walls hear often, and it changed the afternoon in about four bars: people put their glasses down, the bridesmaids started dancing on the grass, and the group photos took twice as long as they should have. We didn’t mind at all.
And then dancers inside giant transparent balls came rolling down the lawn, and whatever composure the guests had left went rolling with them!
Dinner was in the red salon, and that room does the work it was built for. Gold chairs on burgundy velvet, tall candles down the middle of every table, low bowls of blush roses between them, and the chandeliers turned down until the whole room glowed.
Gold, white and red, with the pink of the flowers running through it: romantic in the way only candlelight in an old house can be. Sandy came back down in a second dress for it, fitted lace with a train that followed her between the tables, and the whole room stood up.
We photograph a room like this before anybody sits down, while the candles are lit and the napkins are still square, and then we put the lights away and let the candlelight do it. A tip worth having: ask your caterer to light the candles half an hour earlier than they plan to. It costs nothing and it is the difference between photographs of a dining room and photographs of an evening.
Twenty Minutes of Sunset, Stolen Between Courses
Between courses, we stole them. Twenty minutes is all a July sunset gives you here, so we walked the two of them down to the fountain and back under the flower arch while their guests carried on happily without them.
That’s the light you book this house for: nine in the evening, the stone turning gold, the park empty behind you. They spent most of it laughing at something we didn’t hear, which is usually how the most romantic frames happen anyway. Leave twenty minutes for it in your timeline, wherever you marry.
Back inside there was a champagne tower, a croquembouche and enough dessert to feed the village. And then, twice in one night, the lights went off for something nobody had warned the guests about.
First a fire dancer, out on the gravel, throwing sparks up the whole front of the château while everybody crowded onto the steps. Later, ballerinas in lit tutus turning in the middle of the salon, who danced the wedding cake in at the end of it. Magical is the only word for that one.
They had their first dance, and then the chairs came out for La Víbora de la Mar, the sea snake.
If you haven’t seen it: the couple stand on chairs facing each other and hold the bride’s veil up between them to make an arch, and everybody else runs underneath hand in hand while the music gets faster and faster. The arch is supposed to hold. It never holds! It’s a Mexican family’s way of getting every single person into the same dance, and by the end of it Sandy was hanging onto her veil and crying with laughter.
It ended the way the best ones always do: the floor full, nobody counting the hours, and a perfect mess of veil and confetti by the door.
Almost last, the bouquet, thrown into a crowd that wanted it far too much!
Two countries, two days, two ceremonies, and a sky full of fireworks that belonged to somebody else. Sandy and Adrien never chose between the wedding she wanted and the one he grew up with, and the day was twice as beautiful for it. Thank you both, it was a joy.
If you are planning something similar, our advice after this one is simple. Give each family the part of the day that means most to them, even if it means marrying twice. Put a twenty minute gap in the timeline for the light, and tell us where the surprises are going to come from, because the only thing a photographer cannot fix is not knowing. Everything else is detail.
The wedding team
- Location Château de Champlâtreux, Le Plessis-Luzarches
- Photography and film Through The Glass Paris, stills and film
- Bride’s dress Bridal Boutique Lewisville
- Bride’s shoes Jimmy Choo
- Groom’s suit Creation Morgan
- Entertainment a mariachi band, a fire dancer and ballerinas, and the sea snake dance
If a French château wedding is the one you keep picturing, our Paris wedding photographer page has how we work, and Château Bouffémont is the other house we would send you to look at first. When you have a date, tell us about it.
