Uptown / St. Charles Avenue

The Columns

★★★★★

The Columns is the St. Charles Avenue fantasy made bookable: an 1883 Italianate mansion under the oak canopy, its white-columned double veranda facing the streetcar line, restored from beloved-but-creaky institution into a polished twenty-room small hotel whose ground floor doubles as the neighborhood's favorite porch. The veranda is the point — locals outnumber guests at the marble-topped tables, oysters and caviar service meet spritzes and Sazeracs from late morning to late night, and the view (live oaks, mansions, the olive-green streetcars sparking past) is Uptown's whole argument staged as a bar. Inside, the Victorian bones run glorious — the mahogany staircase and stained-glass skylight starred in Pretty Baby's notorious scenes when this was a very different establishment — and the rooms upstairs now run airy and antique-layered: high ceilings, four-posters and clawfoots in the grander categories, compact charmers under the eaves, no two alike. There is no pool, no spa, no elevator in the usual sense; the amenity is the house itself and the avenue it watches. Base math suits the second-visit crowd and the romance trade: the Garden District's mansion core ten blocks downriver, Audubon Park and the universities ten up, Magazine Street a half-mile over, and the Quarter twenty-five minutes away by the streetcar that stops, perfectly, at the front walk.

The house's biography is pure New Orleans: built in 1883 as a tobacco merchant's mansion by architect Thomas Sully (the avenue's great house-builder), it drifted through boarding-house decades, became a hotel in mid-century, and spent the late twentieth century as the city's most atmospheric slightly-shabby institution — the Victorian lounge and veranda hosting generations of Uptown courtships, Tulane graduations, and jazz-brunch Sundays, with Louis Malle borrowing the staircase and skylight for Pretty Baby's Storyville story in 1978. The recent restoration (by local hoteliers who understood the assignment) kept the patina and fixed the systems: the mahogany bar gleams, the plasterwork and skylight glow, and the kitchen now matches the setting — raw bar, caviar, a serious burger, and a wine list built for porch afternoons.

Living in it: the twenty rooms sort by grandeur rather than view theatrics — the avenue-front categories with veranda access or oak-window sashes are the occasion bookings (streetcar rumble included, quieting after midnight, charming before it), the garden-side and eave rooms run quieter and gentler on the rate card, and everything shares the antique-and-linen register; this is a house for readers and porch-sitters, not gym-seekers. Breakfast arrives civilized; evenings the lounge pours to a crowd worth joining — the Columns functions as Uptown's salon, and staying upstairs makes you a member rather than a visitor.

Strategy: book it for the New Orleans of avenues and oaks — Garden District mornings, Audubon afternoons, Magazine Street grazing — with the Quarter as a streetcar expedition rather than a doorstep; couples and solo romantics are the native species, families fit better in the suites than the eaves, and festival weeks (Jazz Fest especially, with the Fair Grounds a straight shot) sell the house out months ahead. The veranda needs no reservation for guests who wander down at golden hour, which is the entire point: the city's best seat is the front porch you happen to live above.