A Glamorous Monaco Wedding at Monte-Carlo Beach

Photographed by Danilo & Sharon

Charlotte and Charlie married over three days on the Riviera, in three places that shared almost nothing except their guest list: a chequerboard marble dining room above the harbour in Monaco, a thatched beach club on the pebbles at Èze, and finally the long blue rectangle of the Olympic pool at Monte-Carlo Beach, just over the border into France at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where the vows were said in black tie beside a terracotta diving tower. What held the weekend together was not a scheme imposed on it. It was the hotel’s own colour: the terracotta of those 1929 diving boards and the ochre walls above them, taken up by JZ Events and Alice Wilkes Design and run as a coral stripe through the chuppah, the aisle, the linen and the paper.

Friday belonged to the city. At La Môme, guests arrived along a candlelit corridor of chequerboard marble lined with candelabra and pink hydrangea, into a room of peacock-print chairs and burl wood where the tables ran out onto a terrace above the harbour. Charlotte wore a sculptural vintage Versace gown, its ivory bodice cut through with open lattice panels, and more than a hundred carats of yellow diamonds by Jewels Aficionado. Below the terrace the yachts sat in their berths and the light went out of the sky at half past nine. It was the only evening of the three held by a room rather than by the water.

Saturday ran on softer materials. Lunch and dancing moved to Anjuna Plage, on the pebble shore at Èze, where towers of lemons and white flowers stood on block-printed cotton, carved wooden pelicans kept the door of the beach hut, and oversized fish were painted across the bar floor. Crudités came out in wooden bowls beside gravlax and spritzes. Charlotte made the same case in what she wore, a pearl-beaded macramé dress at the table and a pearl chain belt on a Chanel swimsuit out on the water. Nothing on that beach had been polished, and nothing about it asked to be.

By Sunday afternoon the pool terrace had been dressed in the hotel’s own colour. A canopy of coral-and-white striped silk stood at the water’s edge, the same stripe painted the length of the aisle runner beneath it, and banks of peonies, ranunculus and garden roses by FLOWERBX ran along both sides, packed so densely they read as weather rather than arrangement. The palette admits nothing outside a narrow band of coral, apricot and cream, closed at the top by the terracotta of the diving tower and the ochre of the hotel above it.

The ceremony itself was small against the architecture holding it. Charlotte walked the length of an Olympic seawater pool in an Elie Saab couture gown, its bodice worked in three-dimensional florals and its cathedral veil trailing across the poolside tiles, with hair by Jaime Alcivar and makeup by Sierra Ashley kept deliberately clean underneath. Rows of filigree chairs faced the sea, and a string quartet in pink silk played at the foot of the diving tower. The portraits then moved out onto the pontoon, furled yellow parasols and striped loungers running in two lines toward a single point of red lettering (the hotel’s own name, in place since 1929). Few wedding venues in France can absorb a couture gown without either flattening it or competing with it.

After dark the discipline loosened. Dinner ran the length of the pool on red and white striped cloth, with red-rimmed plates and small pleated lampshades, while a saxophonist and a percussionist in cream suits played between the tables. The cake arrived the size of a table and covered edge to edge in rose petals, ringed with gold sparklers. Charlotte changed into an Oscar de la Renta party dress, all sequins and star-shaped tulle, and Your Dream Band took the floor under a neon sign until the small hours. Three days, three registers, one coastline. For all the couture and the carats, the setting was never asked to step aside for any of it.