Multi-Day wedding at La Clé
There is a particular kind of couple who chooses the Franschhoek valley not because it is the most obvious answer, but because it is the most honest one. They have seen Tuscany and Provence. They know what beautiful looks like. They are looking for something that cannot be replicated — a place that gives the celebration a character all its own and asks for nothing manufactured in return.
Janine and Patrick flew in from Switzerland with exactly that in mind. Over three days at La Clé Lodge — one of Franschhoek’s most intimate and considered private estates — they gathered their people, celebrated in style, and left with the kind of memories that begin to feel like something you dreamed rather than something you attended.
Pre-wedding Event – An Evening in the Village
The celebration opened with dinner at Reubens, one of the Franschhoek valley’s most enduring tables, where the couple and their guests settled into each other’s company over a long meal that doubled as both arrival and welcome. There is wisdom in beginning this way: a quieter first evening, unhurried, in a room built for conversation. It set the register for everything that followed.
The Bride
On the morning of the wedding, the bridal suite at La Clé held that particular stillness that only arrives on the edge of something significant. Janine is a bride who carries her elegance lightly. A gown of delicate lace at the bodice swept into layers of tulle; pearl-strapped heels; a beaded pearl clutch. On the dressing table, her wedding invitation rested as its own quiet work of art: a card bearing a hand-painted watercolour of the La Clé lodge facade, tied with a linen ribbon and a sun-dried slice of orange, her initials set in deep forest green. It is a detail that tells you everything about the kind of couple who thought of it.
La Clé in Franschhoek
Exquisite bridal details
Ceremony At the Water’s Edge
La Clé’s willow-lined dam sits at the edge of the estate’s magnificent grounds, the mountains closing in on both sides, the water still and mirror-smooth in the late morning. It was here, beneath the trailing canopy of the weeping willows, that Janine and Patrick married.
In place of a formal floral arch, the ceremony was framed by a sweeping, ground-level installation that stretched along the water’s edge like a garden at the height of its season: coral and deep burgundy dahlias, mounded hydrangeas in dusty sage and blush, purple delphiniums rising tall at the edges, kangaroo paw adding its spiky African note to an otherwise European palette. The effect was lush, wild at its edges, and completely rooted in this particular place. The mountains did the rest.
Pretty in Pink with brightly coloured floral bouquets
Pre-Reception – The Hour the Valley Is Famous For
Franschhoek in the late afternoon is difficult to overstate. The valley is narrow, the peaks are close, and when the sun begins its descent behind them the light that pools across the estate takes on a warmth you feel rather than simply see — amber and generous, the colour of the season itself.
It was into this light that the pre-reception unfolded on La Clé’s pool terrace: linen sofas and bistro chairs arranged around the water, festoon lights swaying overhead, the gardens open on all sides to the mountains. The mood was easy, celebratory, and then — right on cue — the music arrived. A five-piece Mariachi ensemble took their place on the terrace, guitars and saxophone and voices lifting clean into the golden air, and the afternoon became the kind of afternoon that guests mention for years afterward. The spontaneity was entirely planned. That is, quietly, the whole point.
Relaxed Lounging for Canapés and Cocktails
Wedding Reception – A Garden, Overhead
The reception drew guests back under La Clé’s covered terrace for a long table set beneath one of the most arresting floral installations we have had the pleasure of creating: hundreds of dahlias — hot pink, deep coral, burnt orange, and the softest peach — suspended in dense, cascading clusters overhead. Dining beneath them felt like sitting inside a garden that had turned itself upside down, the colour close enough to touch, the scent warm and sweet as the evening settled in.
The table itself was composed with a relaxed European confidence. Wicker charger plates anchored each setting. Blue crystal tumblers caught the candlelight. White side plates with a bold cobalt botanical print brought a note of the unexpected. And at each place, wrapped in a linen bow, a tea towel: hand-painted with a watercolour of the La Clé lodge, each guest’s name embroidered by hand along the border. Not a gesture toward a gift, but a considered keepsake — a piece of the place, made personal, to carry home across the world. Between the floral clusters on the table, small ceramic bowls held clementines, their colour an exact echo of the blooms overhead, their presence on a wedding table a quiet, unhurried delight.
It is in decisions like these — the hand-stitched names, the painted crockery, the fruit at the table — that a wedding ceases to be an event and becomes an expression of the two people at the centre of it.
Suspended florals reminiscent of an African sunset
After Party – When the Music Changed
As dinner gave way to the evening’s later register, the saxophonist joined the DJ and the after-party found its feet. This is the part of a wedding that resists planning and rewards trust: a room that has been together long enough, full enough, happy enough, that the music becomes necessary. By all accounts, it was.
Post -Wedding Brunch – The Third Morning
Because three days deserves a proper ending, the final morning returned to the pool at La Clé — sunlight on the water, mountains in their usual stations, the whole estate quiet and unhurried. A pool party that made no effort to feel like a closing, which is perhaps why it was the perfect one.
Janine and Patrick came from Switzerland looking for something they could not find closer to home. They found it in a willow-lined valley in the Cape, in a lodge with three hundred years of history in its walls, and in three days that moved from a candlelit dinner to a dahlia-hung table to an afternoon that the light itself seemed to have prepared for.
If you are imagining a Winelands celebration across more than one day — one that gives your guests time to arrive, settle, and truly gather — we would love to begin the conversation.
Supplier Credits:
Photos: Maxwell Art Photography
Flowers: Fleur Le Cordeur
Decor & Styling: Scape Events
Servers & Bar Staff: Hero Events
Catering: Table Seven
Entertainment: The Wedding Dj’s | The Kings Club
Hair: Irina Grant
Make-up: Andrea van den Houten
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