In , a French fur trader from the North American frontier sailed the length of the Mississippi to its delta. There he erected a commemorative column and claimed, 'in the name of the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince Louis the Great, the vast wilderness he had traversed. Thus Louis XIV, far away in his glittering palaces, gave his name to the Louisiana Territory, three times the size of his own country.
This untamed and far flung region, and its eventual major city, New Orleans, would be successively French, Spanish and briefly French again, until in it was sold to a fledgling United States of America. That proud column no doubt sank into the swamps on which New Orleans was so ingeniously built, but the Bourbon dynasty is indelibly stamped on the city. Distinct from the mint-julep, southern-belle gentility of cities such as Natchez and Monroe, and the Anglophile aristocracy of Charleston and Atlanta, New Orleans was a potpourri of European nationalities β French, Spanish, German, Italian and Slav, as well as the enslaved Africans and the watchful Native Americans.
For all its fabled atmosphere of laissez-faire, it was a city built on commerce, chiefly cotton - diamond hard beneath the magnolia skin, knife-sharp under the languor. Many of these former ateliers have since declined; in the heart of the Quarter, how ever, they have become residential, with wide verandas shading luscious courtyards. Rodney and Frances Smith, whose s mansion in the Garden District I helped decorate some fifteen years ago, moved into the house next door to the hotel and once more asked me to redesign, specifying only that the main space on the ground floor was to be the showroom for the stylish antique furniture and objects Rodney and Frances buy on their trips to Europe; otherwise the house could be rearranged to have a grander staircase hall and fewer, better-proportioned rooms.
With the help of brilliant young architect Frank Masson, the enlarged spaces were established: once higher ceilings were conjured out of thin air and huge bathrooms and dressing rooms coaxed from seemingly minute nooks, we started planning the interior design. The nationalities of those bygone craftsmen seemed a perfect source to draw on.
From Italian palazzi came the stone-white staircase hall with scarlet curtains, while French ironwork inspired the blue-black balustrade. Russia was represented in the small, book-lined dining room, its ceiling painted with clouds and its narrow columns based on those taken from the tsar's bedroom at the Catherine Palace; tiles for the bathroom came from the St Petersburg factory used by Peter the Great.
