Favorite Building Friday! This week to celebrate our annual French Quarter Fest, we headed back down to New Orleans’ most famous neighborhood to pick out a new house to showcase on our Favorite Building Friday segment. Away from the hustle and bustle of Bourbon Street, tucked away at 707 Dumaine Street is the de La Torre House. The de la Torre House doesn’t make many Favorite New Orleans Houses Lists and I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that most visitors to the city don’t even notice this home, they just walk past it on their way to Bourbon Street.[…]

For this week’s Favorite Building Friday, we are heading uptown to talk about the Carrollton Courthouse. Located at the top of the St. Charles Streetcar line is Carrollton, a lovely and mostly residential neighborhood situated in a bend of the Mississippi River and extends to the Jefferson Parish Line.  This area was originally part of Bienville’s property upon the founding of New Orleans, and as time went on it was subdivided and sold. By the early 1800’s this property was in the hands of the McCarty Family, who were prosperous sugar planters. In the 1830s, the family sold their property[…]

For today’s Favorite Building Friday, I would like to share with you another building that Hyacinth Laclotte worked on: the Pedesclaux-Lemonnier House. This lot was purchased in 1795 by Pierre Pedesclaux, a Notary for the Spanish Government. As a result of the recent fires (1788 and 1794), the lot was empty. He commissioned Barthélémy Lafon to build his home. Lafon was an architect who had designed some stunning homes that can still be seen in the French Quarter today: Bosque House (616 Chartres Street) and the Rillieux House (343 Royal Street). Construction began on this three story home, but Pedesclaux[…]

Favorite Building Friday! For this week’s Favorite Building Friday, I want to share the not only one of my favorite buildings, but it is also one of my favorite casual restaurants in the city: the Napoleon House. I had lunch at this spot earlier in the week, and it really reminded me of how much I love this building. The Napoleon House was built in 1814 for Nicholas Girod, mayor of New Orleans from 1812-1815. If you have been by this building, I know that you are thinking, that the sign over the door says 1797. Yes, it sure does,[…]