Since its completion, this grand nineteenth-century Creole town house in the French Quarter of New Orleans has been considered one of the most splendid homes in the Vieux Carré. For this special residence, I wanted to create an environment that not only exalts the house’s brilliant historical features but also reflects the distinctive personalities of the homeowners and the vivid, eccentric spirit of the city. Channeling the fertile, cross-cultural history of the Big Easy, but leaning into French design, I selected a mélange of furnishings that spans vintage twentieth-century treasures by André Sornay, Serge Roche, and Maison Jansen, heavily carved mirrors and cabinets from the previous century, and signature chairs and tables by avant-garde contemporary masters Mattia Bonetti and the brothers Simon and Nikolai Haas. Given the expansive scale of the project—the house is nearly nine thousand square feet, with lofty thirteen-foot ceilings—the decorative moves needed to be bold. In the main parlor, which measures twenty-five feet square, I paired a custom Jansen-inspired sofa with four large Bonetti lounge chairs beneath an existing crystal chandelier that harks back to an earlier era of New Orleans glamour.

 

Artworks by Evan Holloway and Angel Otero ground the composition in the present and play off an imposing antique carved-wood cabinet that is a family heirloom. In the similarly scaled dining room, where French doors open onto a gallery, the mahogany-topped dining table and reproduction Louis XVI chairs in black leather occupy one side of the space, balanced by a curvaceous corner banquette and custom swivel chairs for informal socializing on the opposite side. As a testament to the scale of the residence, the lighting fixture that crowns the primary bedroom is fully four feet square. For a splash of New Orleans luxe, the custom four-poster bed is wrapped in blue velvet, and windowed doors leading to the second- floor gallery are treated to draperies in the same fabric. An antique Italian daybed in the corner is covered in a similarly hued mohair. A Scandinavian lounge chair and ottoman are upholstered in shearling for chromatic and textural contrast, and the whole composition is set on a sprawling jute carpet dyed a greenish blue. Another estimable collection of contemporary art further energizes a house designed to skip to the beat of a city where the party never ends.