Two Days on the Lake
A boat dressed entirely in flowers, a beach lit up for a welcome party, and a wedding the next day in a garden that opens straight onto the water. The story of Rachaela & Sébastien, at Palace de Menthon.
Some weddings are built around a single ceremony. This one was built around a lake, for two days. Rachaela and Sébastien brought their guests to Palace de Menthon on the shore of Lake Annecy and let the water carry the whole weekend — a welcome crossing by boat the evening before, and a wedding the next day in a garden above the shoreline that ran long into the night.
The Welcome
It began on the water. The evening before the wedding, a classic wooden boat crossed Lake Annecy dressed entirely in flowers — arrangements built for a single trip, gone by morning, and unmistakably the opening scene of the weekend. Guests were already waiting at the pier when it arrived, cameras up, cheering before anyone had even stepped off.
On shore, the beach had been turned into a welcome party under a run of stretch tents: a small market stall stocked with local specialities — jars of honey, bottles of green Chartreuse, lavender soaps, postcards of Annecy — next to a lawn game or two for the guests who’d arrived early. Rachaela and Sébastien gave a joint toast, in English and in French, thanking everyone for making the trip. What followed had no fixed programme: a wood-fired grill running late into the evening, a record player turning on a side table, a game of pétanque on the gravel path, and an ice cream cart working the crowd as the light went down over the water.
It is the part of a destination wedding that rarely gets planned around and even more rarely gets remembered the way the ceremony does — which is exactly why it deserves to be told.
Getting Ready
The next morning split the palace in two. Rachaela and her bridesmaids, still in matching blush silk robes, opened a round of champagne alongside personalised gifts — keepsake necklaces engraved with a line simple enough to mean something: tell your story. Sébastien dressed elsewhere in the building with his groomsmen, who each received an engraved lighter marked with the wedding date — the kind of detail nobody plans a morning around, and everybody keeps.
The Ceremony
Rachaela’s father saw her in her dress before anyone else did, turning to find her in the palace gardens for a first look that needed no soundtrack beyond the sound of him trying not to cry. Portraits followed beside a cream vintage roadster, before the wedding party gathered for the walk down the grand tiered staircase, the stone lined the whole way with flowers.
A trio played — harp, violin, cello — as guests took their seats in a garden that sits above Lake Annecy rather than beside it, the water and the mountains behind it doing the work no floral installation could. The ceremony itself took place inside a wooden gazebo at the water’s edge. Rachaela and Sébastien had written their own vows and read them at the altar, hers in English, his in French — two languages, in their own way, saying the same thing. Their parents shared a symbolic toast from a single cup partway through the ceremony, an old gesture that still lands exactly as it’s meant to.
A wedding that used its setting on purpose — the same lake for the welcome, the same water behind the vows.
The Reception
Cocktail hour didn’t sit still. A saxophonist played alongside the DJ while guests took turns at a collaborative watercolour station, painting their way across a banner that would end the night signed by nearly everyone there. Dinner ran past a whole Iberian ham carved to order and a spread of raclette and fondue, with speeches — from parents, from bridesmaids, from groomsmen — moving between English and French for most of the evening.
After Dark
The croquembouche went up in sparklers, then fireworks took over the sky above the lake — the same water the boat had crossed the night before. A funk band kept the dance floor full long past the point most weddings call it a night, and just outside, a taco truck did steady business until well past midnight, a neon sign overhead making its case for itself: less talk, more tacos. Somewhere between the photo booth and the last song, two days on the lake became one weekend nobody was in a hurry to end.
