The question comes up constantly, and always in the same anxious tone: can you really organise a wedding in France if you do not live there?
Yes. We did it for Thiphaine and Rémi, who lived in Dubai, over a year of preparation, with our meetings held in English and in Portuguese. Here is how it works in practice, including the part that usually stays backstage: the wedding day seen from our side.
One trip, and it is for the venue
They flew over six months before, for one thing only: to see the estate. That is the right use of a plane ticket.
A venue cannot be judged from photographs. You have to feel the late afternoon light, the distance between the park and the dining room, the sound the gravel makes. Everything else can be decided remotely. The venue cannot.
If you can only make one trip, make it to visit, and make it early enough to sign while you are there.
Three channels, each with its job
Email, video calls and the telephone are not interchangeable, and keeping them distinct is what makes a remote project move quickly.
- Email for anything that has to stay in writing: quotes, contracts, quantities, timings. It leaves a trace, and the time difference does not bother it.
- Video calls for anything that has to be looked at: a mood board, a mock-up of a table, a fabric swatch held up to the camera. You can see on someone’s face straight away whether they like it.
- The telephone for anything that is hesitating. A budget decision takes ten minutes of conversation, or three days of emails.
The decoration is decided from a folder
This is the part couples worry about most, and it is the simplest. We build a folder of mock-ups: the table laid as it will be, the room seen from the door, the colours side by side.
The couple approves, corrects, asks again. Nothing is ordered before they agree. They do not discover their decoration on the day: they already know it, they are simply seeing it for real for the first time.
Suppliers, without meeting them
They were found online, compared on quotes, chosen on contracts, and met by video call or telephone. Not one of them shook the couple’s hand before the wedding day.
Two things make that possible. The first is that we already know them: we do not put forward a caterer whose food we have never tasted. The second is that the contract is signed and paid by the couple, directly, never by us. At a distance that rule protects you more than anywhere else: you know exactly where your money goes.
We take no commission from any supplier. That is a French wedding planning habit we have never adopted.
What you will not see: the van
Here is the part nobody puts in a brochure, and it is the part that explains the invoice.
A couple arriving from abroad a few days before their wedding cannot set anything up. It all rests on us. That day there were four of us, and a van packed to the roof to unload: the decoration for the room, for the grounds, and for the church.
We were still installing late into the night. We did not sit down until after midnight.
That is not a complaint, it is information: a wedding prepared from far away needs more hands on the ground, and that belongs in the budget from the start.
And the one thing that went wrong had nothing to do with distance
The only hitch of the day: the family arrived late at the church and the priest was losing patience. It had nothing to do with Dubai, the time difference or remote planning.
Everything else went beautifully. That is often true of weddings prepared from a distance, and the reason is simple: nothing can be improvised, so everything is decided in advance.
What to remember if you are far away
- Save your trip for visiting the venue, and come early enough to sign while you are in the country.
- Insist on mock-ups of the decoration before anything is ordered. You should know what your room will look like.
- Sign and pay every supplier yourselves.
- Budget for enough hands on set-up day: you will not be there to help, and neither will your witnesses.
- Put the time difference into your schedule. An answer that takes a full day changes the length of the whole project.
English
Getting married in France from somewhere else
The first conversation is free and happens by video call if you are far away. We work in French, English, Portuguese and Spanish.