Hannah & Jordan
Hannah has never set foot in Newcastle, but she talks about it like she's lived here before, some freakish sixth-sense pull toward a city on the far side of the country she has never actually seen. So she did the thing you do with a feeling like that and googled Newcastle elopements. We came up, she saw we'd started taking couples to Europe, and that was it. Her mind was made up on the spot.
They handled the legal side at home in Australia and saved the part that was just theirs for France. Somewhere most people have never heard of, a village called Montbrison-sur-Lez in the Drôme Provençale, right where the lavender roads begin. Just the two of them, such a perfect day.
The Drôme Provençale is Provence before Provence gets busy. This is the quiet top edge of it, vineyards and olive groves and low hills that run gold in the late light, the Lez winding through, cicadas going all afternoon. Grignan and its château sit off in the distance. Mont Ventoux holds down the horizon. In the third week of June the lavender was only just turning, the first purple coming into fields that would be humming by July. The Airbnb had the kind of garden you would write into a play, old stone warmed through by the sun, an archway heavy with green, and trees you could stand under and be married. Hannah and Jordan brought their own lace and candles and let the place carry the rest. Fitting, then, that the reading in their ceremony was Shakespeare.
The Details
Date: June, 2026
Location: Montbrison-sur-Lez, Provence, France
Venue: Private Airbnb with garden and pool, Montbrison-sur-Lez
Celebrant: Izzy, Hitched by Hazell
Photographer: Emily, Solis Stories
Live Music: Rhys Love
Florals: From the local market, arranged by Jordan
Private Chef
The Day
The morning belonged to them. They slept in, went out for a walk, drove to the next town over for something to cook, and had breakfast and coffee back at the house with nowhere in particular to be. Hannah had been to the local market the day before and come home with armfuls of flowers, so somewhere between a swim and a slow lunch he set about arranging them and dressing the garden for later.
Just before it started, they each lit a candle for the people they wished could have been there. A quiet minute for the ones they were carrying with them, and then the day tipped over into celebration.
At four, Jordan waited under the trees while Rhys sang Moon River, and Hannah walked out to him. Izzy welcomed them, spoke about how the two of them found their way to each other, and read Sonnet 116, Shakespeare's promise that real love holds steady while everything around it moves. They had a sonnet read by Hannah’s mum at their legal ceremony back in Australia too, so it very nicely stitched the two days together across the world. Then the vows they'd written, Hannah first, read out of the little books they'd filled. The rings came out of a double box. And to send them off, Rhys put Shakespeare down and played Kickstarts, which tells you most of what you need to know about the sort of wedding this was.
The champagne went off the second it was done. After that we spent the evening working our way around the garden, the archway, the trees, following the light as it softened. We all hoped in the car and drove around to a local lavendar field, followed by a quick strop into an old church. The local priest was around and kindly let us in to see the spectacular architecture from the inside and take a couple of photos- how special!
From six the light did the thing it does over the Drôme, low and gold and forgiving, and those are the frames that end up on a wall. A private chef arrived to cook, and the two of them sat down to dinner in the last of it, married, a long way from home, exactly as they'd planned.
Two people and one garden in the south of France. That was the whole guest list, and it was plenty. If that's the wedding you've been picturing, our destination elopement package was built for it. We're based in Newcastle, and very happy to get on a plane.
