Happy Monday to you and we are starting the week in spectacular style with an elegant French Countryside wedding where the bride wore a stunning Galia Lahav wedding dress, all captured by Chris Spira Photography.

This is a beautiful real wedding, but what really spoke to my heart about the wedding was the couples ability to not fit into any traditional wedding box. They didn't plan a 'vintage' or 'rustic' wedding but instead listened to their hearts and planned a wedding that truly reflected their personalities set in the French countryside.

Today's beautiful bride takes us through their romantic day:

"We wanted to get married in France as moved to Montpellier together in 2012, not long after we first met. We fell in love with the French culture, particularly the cuisine and try to spend as much time as possible exploring France.

Our families also come from all over the world... UK, Ireland, South Africa, Israel so we wanted a beautiful place for our families to spend time together.

Elegant French Countryside Wedding Snapshot

We looked at loads of venues across France but fell in love with Comptoir Saint-Hilaire, Provence, as soon as we saw it, even though it was winter. There's something magical about the place and the view is spectacular. We loved how all the bedrooms were uniquely decorated and how there were so many different parts of the venue for our wedding guests to explore.

The venue is so beautiful we didn't feel we needed too much by way of decoration, but we engaged the services of Award Weddings as our wedding planner.

I love sunflowers (which are local to Provence) and my favourite colour is aqua blue so we went with blue and yellow for our colour theme.

We legally got married in the UK before traveling to France which meant we were able to write our own wedding ceremony and vows for the French wedding. Clara's oldest friend who she's known since she was about 7 is an actor and conducted the ceremony for us. We incorporated elements to reflect both family heritages including Judaism (smashing the glass) as well as Christianity/Catholicism.

Our photographer Chris was AMAZING! We fell in love with her pictures and style when we saw her featured on a wedding blog and were so excited to learn she was free for our wedding date. She has loads of energy and her artistic vision is incredible. We absolutely love our wedding photos and we can't stop looking at them and it's such a joy to share them with our friends and family.

Together with Sachin they really captured the little moments and emotion of our wedding day which was exactly what we wanted from our photographer and we'll be able to cherish those memories for the rest of our lives.

The aerobatic display was performed by Adrenalin flights of Montpellier and took months of planning to get the necessary air space closures to perform the stunt display at the wedding. We were meant to have 2 planes but due to the weather they had to switch to use an aircraft better suited to high winds and cloudy conditions. We were blown away (almost literally) by their performance.

We had considered skydiving into the wedding but Clara didn't want to mess up her hair! A group from the bridal party including Matt & Clara jumped at the nearby Alès airfield on Monday.

The food created for the wedding was incredible. We worked hard to find a caterer who would look steak frites for 120 guests and the beef was cooked to perfection! He also made mini eton mess as part of the dessert plate on Matt's request which is not a traditional French recipe!

My advice for wedding planning - I probably would have started planning earlier on in the year.. we did most things in the last 2 months before the wedding. For the planning I only really used French Wedding Style and Pinterest!

We debated whether or not to include children as part of our day but I'm so happy we did as they added a special joy and happiness to the celebrations."

Much love

Monique x

Wedding Vendors

Photographer: Chris Spira Photography | Wedding Planner: Award Weddings | Wedding Dress: Galia Lahav from Serendipity Brides | Bridesmaid Dresses: David's Bridal | Bridesmaid Shoes: Dune | Groom Suit: Spencer Hart | Wedding Cake: Bruno Gourdet | Entertainment: Groupe Juice working with Apollo Fish | Bride's Hair and Make up: Anita Warszawska | Stationery: Pepper & Joy | Aerobic Display: Adrenalin flights of Montpellier |