The marble header above the Magazine Street entrance still reads “St. Vincent’s Infant Asylum,” and the designers left it that way on purpose. Hotel Saint Vincent doesn’t hide what it used to be. It leans into it, and the tension between the building’s somber past and its current life as one of the city’s most stylish places to stay is exactly what makes it worth the trip down to the Lower Garden District.
The building went up between 1861 and 1865, constructed during the Civil War as a refuge for children orphaned by yellow fever, a disease that killed nearly half of those who contracted it in 19th-century New Orleans.
The woman behind it was Margaret Haughery, an Irish immigrant who arrived in New Orleans in 1835, built a successful bakery, and poured the profits into caring for the city’s poor. She funded the asylum almost entirely on her own.
Two years after her death in 1882, the city erected a statue of her at the intersection of Camp and Prytania, making it the second public monument to a woman in American history. Her name lives on in the small park near the hotel, and her initials are woven into the wallpaper patterns inside the guest bathrooms.
The building spent most of the 20th century declining slowly, cycling through uses as a hostel and budget guesthouse before developer Zachary Kupperman bought it in 2017 with a clearer vision.
A $22.5 million restoration followed, covering all five historically designated buildings on the campus. The team from Austin-based Lambert McGuire Design kept the original red brick exterior, wrought-iron railings, and interior layout largely intact, then layered a deliberate wave of 1960s and 70s Italian modernism over the top.
The result is moody grey guest rooms with Murano glass chandeliers, a hot pink velvet and marble bar, custom mohair couches, and terracotta-tiled bathrooms with psychedelic wallpaper pulled from the patterns in Margaret Haughery’s own handwritten ledgers.
Outside, the courtyard pool area hits a different register entirely. Palm trees, pink and white striped cabanas, and a full bar give it the feel of a midcentury Italian Riviera resort that somehow landed inside a Victorian orphanage campus.
The original Virgin Mary grotto still occupies a corner of the courtyard not far from the pool deck, which is as New Orleans a juxtaposition as you’re going to find anywhere. The guest-only Chapel Club is dark and salon-styled. San Lorenzo, the hotel’s main restaurant, serves coastal Italian.
The Elizabeth Street Café handles breakfast and Vietnamese fare throughout the day. The Lower Garden District has a neighborhood quality that the French Quarter rarely offers, and Hotel Saint Vincent settles right into that. It’s at 1507 Magazine St. Visit their site for rates and reservations.
