Italian-Inspired Alfresco Wedding
STEPHANIE & MAXIME at DOMAINE CATARAQUI
Stephanie and Maxime's Italian-inspired alfresco wedding at Domaine Cataraqui unfolded on a luminous July afternoon — a 19th-century estate in Quebec City where heritage architecture meets century-old gardens overlooking the St. Lawrence. Their vision was personal: a luxurious wedding that felt like the dinner parties they love hosting at home, only on a grander scale. A summer night in Tuscany, transposed to the heart of Quebec.
The ceremony took place outdoors beneath century-old trees, with their eldest daughter reading a speech that left no dry eye in the garden. This was a wedding honoring not just a marriage, but the life this family had already built together. Stephanie walked toward Maxime in a beaded gown; Maxime in dusty blue. White florals threaded through soft sage. Pared-back, intentional, quietly luxurious.
What stayed with me long after the day ended was the kind of people Stephanie and Maxime are — generous hosts, devoted parents, the sort of couple whose goodness shows up in how everyone around them speaks about them. Their eldest daughter said it best: she spoke about watching the way her father loves her mother, and how she hoped one day to find a man who would love her the same way. You could feel that love in every speech, every toast, every quiet aside shared between the people closest to them.
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The first look between Stephanie and Maxime was full of it. So was the moment their daughter saw her mother in her wedding dress and told her she looked like a princess. So was the moment Maxime watched his little girls walk toward him in their flower-girl dresses, the father-daughter bond unmissable, with Stephanie nearby — close enough to witness it, far enough to let it be theirs. I laughed with them. I cried with them. By the end of the night, I felt less like the photographer and more like one of the people lucky enough to be there. This is the kind of wedding that reminds me why I do what I do.
As the sun dipped below the tree line, festoon lights came on over a long banquet table set for an alfresco dinner styled by Crème Soda Événements — the kind of table where plates pass, glasses clink, and laughter carries through the warm evening air. Less wedding, more family supper.
Why Domaine Cataraqui Is One of Quebec City's Most European-Feeling Wedding Venues
Domaine Cataraqui is one of my favorite wedding venues in Quebec — and one I return to often when couples ask for a destination wedding feel without crossing the Atlantic. The 19th-century manor, its formal French gardens, the stone fountain, the ivy-clad courtyard, the long allées of century-old trees — it carries the architectural DNA of a European country estate, transplanted to a bluff above the St. Lawrence. For couples drawn to the romance of a French château or an Italian villa but planning closer to home, it's one of a small handful of Quebec City wedding venues that genuinely deliver that old-world feel.
