Chapters
A three-day Paris wedding at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée
It started in a restaurant in Milan. David was in the city on business. Mila was at a nearby table. He walked over and said hello, which takes some nerve on a work trip in a foreign country, and it worked.
When it came time to marry, they chose Paris, and they chose to keep things intimate. Sixteen guests. Mila and David did not want to spend their own wedding introducing themselves to people. They wanted the friends and family who mattered most, in one city, for three days, with nowhere else to be. And a guest list that size lets the budget go further — more depth and more quality in everything, all else being equal.
What that bought them was a proper weekend. Vintage sidecars and a wine cellar on Friday. A bilingual ceremony, a candlelit reception in Le Salon Haute Couture, a cabaret in three costume changes and a Rolls-Royce to Raspoutine on Saturday. And on Sunday the dress went back on for a portrait day across the city that ended, thanks to Bastille Day, in a packed Métro carriage — a bride with a train, a groom in black tie, and a man in the doorway who never looked up from his phone.
Chantelle Streete and the Kiss Me in Paris team planned, designed and produced all of it, from the hotel and the guest programme to the performers, flowers, cars, photography and film — for a couple in different cities and different time zones, speaking different languages, while it came together.
Planning a wedding is never easy — especially when the bride and groom are in different cities, different time zones, and speaking different languages.
Watch Mila and David’s wedding film
Friday: Paris by sidecar
The invitation said only this: be outside the hotel on Friday afternoon, dressed for a Parisian adventure. Dinner would be at an address in the 2nd arrondissement. Nothing else.
What was waiting on Avenue Montaigne was ten vintage sidecars from Txango Tours. Eight for the guests and the couple, two more for the Kiss Me in Paris photographer and videographer, so the afternoon would be on film as well as on everyone’s phones.
The convoy left from the hotel door and headed straight for the river. Over the bridges with the Eiffel Tower right there, a stop near the Champ de Mars for a group photograph — eight sidecars parked in a row, the couple kissing in front of them — then into Le Marais and its small winding streets, and out again onto the big avenues with all their traffic. Coffee at Café Bonaparte in Saint-Germain. Selfies and reels from the sidecars while the drivers handled the city. Two hours in the open air, and a tour of Paris from an angle almost nobody gets.
It was also an ice-breaker, whether anyone called it that or not. Every guest had flown in from outside France. The American side and the Russian side were meeting for the first time. By the time the convoy pulled up on rue de l’Arbre Sec, they had a shared afternoon behind them.
Les Caves du Louvre is a few streets from the museum, in the vaulted cellars of an eighteenth-century mansion. Mila and David had the whole place to themselves, with a sommelier for the afternoon. Wines from across France, bread and cheeses to go with them, a lesson in regions and grapes and how it all gets made. Then the fun part. Everyone blended their own wine, bottled it, sealed it with red wax and put on a label with Mila and David’s names.
Dinner was outside, in the courtyard at Fontaine Gaillon — the couple’s own pick. Yellow-fringed umbrellas, green-and-white striped chairs, a cherub fountain on the façade, and tables full of hydrangeas and roses in yellow, blue, lavender and pink. By the end of it, a group of people who had been strangers at lunchtime had crossed Paris in a convoy, made wine together and shared a table.
Saturday: the wedding
Saturday began in red.
The Plaza Athénée is the hotel with the red awnings and the red geraniums on every balcony, and the colour follows you inside — the corridor runners, the lampshades, and the oversized red bear waiting on the sofa of Mila’s suite. Her dog had already claimed the other cushion.
The hours before the dress go on set the tone for everything after. They should be spent with people who lift you, with the music you love playing, and — in the food capital of the world — with whatever you feel like eating, even if that isn’t much. Mila had the bear, the dog, and Kassaundra Stephens for hair and makeup, in the Deluxe Suite with the Avenue Montaigne view, whose balcony looks straight at the Eiffel Tower.
The dress hung by the window, fitted in Milan, where Mila had been living before the wedding. Beside it hung a second dress, short and white, for later. Tiffany and Chanel boxes came out before either went on.
The first look
The hotel’s main staircase is up in the suites, away from any passing traffic. White stone, black-and-gold ironwork, a red runner, an oil portrait on the landing. David waited there. Mila came down to him.
He laughed out loud when he saw her. Then he walked once around her, taking in the dress from every side, and they went down the rest of the stairs together.
The staircase gave them the first portraits of the day too — shot from above, from below, from the landing, with the hotel’s own furniture where it stood. Then the wrought-iron balconies, the ivy of La Cour Jardin, the long marble corridors. All of it inside the hotel, and none of it possible anywhere else.
Six o’clock, Le Salon Organza
The ceremony was in Le Salon Organza on the ground floor. Eighty-five square metres, five-and-a-half-metre ceilings, arched windows, and a fireplace banked with white roses and hydrangeas. Eighteen people, and the room felt full.
Marjolaine Vauchelle played harp. Santiago Falcón played violin.
The celebrant from Weddings Art Ceremonies moved between English and Russian. Some passages were said in both languages, some in one, depending on who in the room needed to follow that moment. She had the room laughing.
The dog attended in a black sequinned dress with a tulle skirt, in keeping with the dress code, and kept leaving her spot to go and stand with the couple. It distracted everyone a little.
Cocktail hour
A magician from Agencia Illusion moved through the guests with cards, coins, borrowed phones and a notepad — the King of Spades turning up where it had no business being. At the entrance to Le Salon Haute Couture, impossible to walk past, Inness Illustrations painted watercolour portraits of the guests as they arrived — a gift for each of them to take home.
Le Salon Haute Couture
Guests came in past a gilt console covered in pillar candles and two tall arrangements of white roses and hydrangeas. Leaning against it was an arched mirror engraved with the couple’s names in English and Cyrillic, made by My Plexi — the escort-card display doing double duty as the welcome.
The room is the Plaza’s largest. Seven crystal chandeliers, mirrored panels, red velvet drapes, interiors by Bruno Moinard, and lighting for the night by Blackstone Agency. One long mirrored table ran down the centre of it, white roses and hydrangeas and tall glass candlesticks the full length, and all eighteen sat together.
When we walked into the room at the Plaza Athénée, it was breathtaking. The ambience, lighting, flowers, and overall mood were perfect.
There were toasts. David took the microphone. Cookies from Cakes by Meri were stamped Mila & David 12.07.25. Petra Penttila played saxophone alongside the DJ as dinner turned into dancing.
Cake, champagne tower, three costume changes
The cake came in with sparklers going. Mila and David cut it properly and then fed it to each other badly. David opened the champagne tower.
Then Mila went and changed into the short dress.
Chantelle had put several entertainment options in front of the couple during the planning, and they chose the cabaret. Sublimes Paris sent the dancers, and they came back three times in three different costumes. First the cancan — red, white and black ruffles, fishnets, high kicks — and Mila went in with them. Two more performances followed: gold sequinned catsuits with tall feathered headdresses, and white ostrich-feather fans with rhinestones. Somewhere in the middle of it, David was dancing with a white rose between his teeth.
The grand exit
Firework fountains were lit either side of the hotel’s front door. Mila and David walked out through the sparks with their arms in the air, the guests cheering from the pavement, and a black Rolls-Royce Phantom waiting at the kerb.
Raspoutine is ten minutes away on rue de Bassano, and on a Saturday night in July the good tables after midnight go to people the club knows. Mila is Russian, which made the choice personal. It was also the right room for the end of this night. The Dom Pérignon came out under green light and kept coming.
Sunday: the dress, again
On the wedding day a couple has very little time with the people who flew in for them, and every hour spent on portraits across the city is an hour away from those people. So the long Paris shoot was kept for Sunday.
They started very early. The dress went back on, and so did the black tie. A vintage white Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud convertible took them to the Eiffel Tower, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Medici Fountain and Notre-Dame — posed, unhurried, in parts of the city the wedding day never reached.
It was the day before Bastille Day. Closures around the Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower were expected and planned around. What nobody expected was how early and how far they would spread. By the time the couple were ready to leave the Notre-Dame area, there was no way to get the car back to the hotel.
So they got out, in the dress and the black tie, and took the Métro. A Sunday carriage, a bride with a train, a groom in black tie, and a carriage full of Parisians doing what Parisians do on the Métro, which is not look up.
Why sixteen
An intimate destination wedding is not a large wedding with fewer chairs. It changes where the time goes and where the money goes.
With sixteen guests, Mila and David could talk to everyone and sit at one table. They could move the whole party across Paris in a convoy of sidecars, take over a wine cellar, dine outside, walk from ceremony to reception in thirty seconds and continue to a nightclub as one group. Sixteen people can do things a hundred and sixty cannot.
And the budget went into what those sixteen experienced: a Palace hotel, a private Friday, flowers, three live musicians and a DJ, a magician, watercolour portraits, a cabaret in three costumes, two Rolls-Royces, photography, film and a second day in Paris.
Chantelle’s connections in Paris are unparalleled: from makeup artists, photographers, and videographers, to vintage cars, specialty patisseries, musicians, dancers, florists, and lighting experts — she brought together a dream team.
Why the Plaza Athénée
Hôtel Plaza Athénée is recognisable before you reach the door. The red awnings, the geranium balconies, the Avenue Montaigne address. It has been there since 1913 and holds the Palace distinction from Atout France, which ranks above five stars.
Inside, every space has its own character. The suites with their Eiffel Tower balconies. The staircase. The ivy of La Cour Jardin. Le Salon Organza. Le Salon Haute Couture. None of them could be anywhere else, and that shows in every photograph.
The hotel hosts weddings of every size. What it gave this one was two rooms of different scales on the same floor — Organza for a ceremony of eighteen, Haute Couture for the reception — and a private entrance from 27 Avenue Montaigne through which the flowers, candles, mirror, champagne tower, sound and performers could all be brought in and finished before a guest walked through the door. Filling a large salon well for a small group is the planner’s job, and one long table did it.
How Chantelle approached it
The first job was not the venue or the date. It was Mila and David. What they loved, what they could not stand, what mattered to them and what didn’t, where they wanted the money to go and where they didn’t. Everything that followed came out of those conversations.
Then the venue, because without a venue there is no date, and without a date nothing else can be booked with confidence — not the vendors, not the performers, not the save-the-dates. Site visits came early. Once the Plaza was confirmed, the vendors who were good enough for this wedding were locked in fast, because the good ones are popular and they book out.
For a wedding like this, with guests crossing an ocean and the couple flying in for tastings and fittings and walkthroughs before the day, Chantelle recommends starting as early as you can. Twelve to sixteen months out is not unusual. She can plan a wedding in under three months when she has to, and has, but a weekend like Mila and David’s is better built without a clock.
For each thing that needed booking, Chantelle put two or three vendors in front of Mila and David. All of them vetted. Most were people the team had worked with before. Mila and David made the calls. Then Chantelle’s team took the hotel approvals, the vendor contracts, the insurance certificates, the loading schedules, the changing rooms, the sound checks and the minute-by-minute timeline, and handled every one of them directly with the hotel and each vendor, in French, in Paris. The planning calls are the part a couple looks forward to.
On the day of the wedding, all we had to do was ask, ‘Where do you want me? When do you need me?’ There was no stress, no last-minute panic.
What Chantelle’s team took on for this wedding, and takes on as standard: budget planning and final reconciliation · venue scouting and concept · catering and cake tastings · vendor selection and contracts · timeline and run of show · guest list, mailings and RSVPs · guest itineraries and activities · menu and bar · talent scouting · gift sourcing · guest concierge · wedding website and registry · NDAs where wanted · and bridal services, from dress appointments in Paris to hair and makeup trials and day-of styling.
A ceremony in two languages
Bilingual ceremonies are common in Paris and a good celebrant makes them look easy. Mila and David’s moved between English and Russian, with some passages in both and some in one, depending on who needed to follow. Paris celebrants regularly work in two or three languages, and many will add a line of French — a poet, a welcome — because you are, after all, in France. Like nearly every destination wedding in Paris, this was a symbolic ceremony; the legal part is done at home. Our Paris wedding guide covers how that works.
A dog at the ceremony
Mila’s dog came because the hotel had agreed to it in advance. A hotel that welcomes dogs in its rooms has not automatically welcomed one in its event salons, so it is asked, not assumed — and someone other than the couple is in charge of her for the day.
Where the guests stayed
Some at the Plaza. Others at Saint James, Hôtel Costes and other hotels nearby. We give couples a shortlist at different price points and coordinate the airport transfers across all of them.
Entertainment at a Palace hotel
Cabaret dancers, a champagne tower and firework fountains all need the hotel’s approval, insurance, access plans and sound coordination. The Plaza is used to it. None of it lands on the couple.
What a wedding like this costs
There is no fixed price. The hotel and every vendor quote against the date, the guest count and the production.
A wedding built like this one is a six-figure project. That is what a Palace hotel on Avenue Montaigne comes to once you add a full production, two extra days of guest programming, live musicians, a cabaret, two cars and a night at one of the most expensive clubs in Paris.
A small guest list does not make it cheap. It changes what the money buys. With sixteen people, more of it goes into what each guest sees up close, and into the days around the wedding.
For the full picture of what drives a Paris wedding budget, with comparisons across venues, see our [Paris wedding guide](/paris-wedding/).
Gallery
At a glance
| Details | Information |
|---|---|
| Dates | Friday 11 to Sunday 13 July 2025 |
| Guests | Sixteen, plus Mila and David |
| Venue | Hôtel Plaza Athénée · 25 Avenue Montaigne, Paris 8e |
| Ceremony | Le Salon Organza · English and Russian · harp and violin |
| Reception | Le Salon Haute Couture |
| Dress code | All black. White shirts allowed for the men |
| Friday | Vintage sidecars · private wine workshop · dinner at Fontaine Gaillon |
| Sunday | Portraits across Paris in a white Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, then the Métro |
| Planner | Chantelle Streete · Kiss Me in Paris |
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Questions We Hear First
CAN YOU PROPOSE AT MUSÉE JACQUEMART-ANDRÉ IN PARIS?
Yes. Mitch’s evening was presented to Aydan as a private after-hours visit to Musée Jacquemart-André, with the proposal kept behind the final doors.
The invitation, car and English-speaking guide all belonged to the cover, so nothing about the evening required Aydan to suspect a proposal was coming.
WHO ARRANGES THE MUSEUM ACCESS AND SUPPLIERS?
Yes. The museum access, approvals and production were arranged before Mitch and Aydan arrived.
The evening involved the private visit, flowers, live violin, photography, film, catering and four custom paintings, all coordinated around the museum’s access window.
CAN YOU ADD SOMETHING PERSONAL TO THE PROPOSAL?
Yes. Mitch wanted the proposal to reflect their life together, so four scenes from their relationship were painted especially for the evening.
Nadia created the paintings by hand and displayed them on gilded easels in the Winter Garden. All four travelled home with Mitch and Aydan afterwards.
CAN DINNER HAPPEN INSIDE MUSÉE JACQUEMART-ANDRÉ AFTER THE PROPOSAL?
Yes. Mitch and Aydan stayed at Musée Jacquemart-André for dinner rather than leaving for another venue.
Champagne and portraits followed the proposal in the Winter Garden, then dinner for two began in the Grand Salon at 9:30 PM.
WHAT DOES A MUSÉE JACQUEMART-ANDRÉ PROPOSAL COST?
The museum access is the first line of the budget; the design, the musicians, the photography and film, the custom paintings, and dinner follow from it.
Our full-service proposal planning fee starts at €1,200 or 15% of the budget under management, whichever is greater. Production costs are quoted separately, and you approve them before anything is confirmed. For the museum access and proposal options, see our Musée Jacquemart-André proposal page.
Speak to us.
Your dates, your ideas, your questions — we’ll take it from there.