The Garden District and the streets surrounding it are lined with houses that were built to impress. This list is made up of four of them that now take guests, each one a former private residence where the architecture does most of the talking.
The Chloe
The house at 4125 St. Charles Avenue was designed by Thomas Sully in 1891 for a merchant family and spent decades in various states of occupancy before designer Sara Ruffin Costello got hold of it. Costello, a New Orleans native, approached the renovation as if she were inheriting a family home from an ancestor with very good taste and a fondness for collecting. The result is 14 rooms that each feel like they belong to a different decade, connected by a visual logic of Louisiana swamp greens, navy blues, custom-embroidered linens from Bellino, and record players stocked with albums by New Orleans artists including Lil Wayne and Louis Armstrong.
The common spaces carry the same collected quality. The mahogany bar in the parlor was custom-built by a local woodworker. The restaurant, named the #1 most beautiful hotel restaurant in New Orleans by Visit New Orleans in 2024, serves modern Creole under chef Ben Triola, with smoked chicken and alligator sausage gumbo and shrimp and grits as anchors. Behind the house, a black-and-white checkered pool deck lined with Meyer lemon trees and palmetto palms runs alongside a poolside bar. The saltwater pool operates 24 hours, which matters in New Orleans.
The Chloe has been named one of the Best Hotels in New Orleans by Condé Nast Traveler and won Best Design Hotel in the 2026 Men’s Journal Travel Awards. It’s at 4125 St. Charles Avenue, with the streetcar directly out front. Book at thechloenola.com.
The Columns
Simon Hernsheim was a tobacco merchant who commissioned Thomas Sully to build him a home on St. Charles Avenue in 1883. The result was the only large-scale Italianate villa Sully built in the district, and it still stands today, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, now a 20-room hotel with a porch full of cocktail drinkers watching the streetcar run. It became a boardinghouse during World War I and officially a hotel in 1953, endured decades of varying upkeep, and received a thorough renovation under current ownership that preserved its bones while adding contemporary wit.
The mahogany staircase spiraling up to a domed stained-glass skylight is still the first thing you see when you walk in. Rooms run from 10 to 15 feet in ceiling height and are decorated with collected antiques, four-poster beds, claw-foot tubs, and Tivoli radios, each one distinct from the next. Second-floor rooms open onto a private balcony overlooking the avenue. A neon-lit “confession” booth sits somewhere in the common areas, which tells you something about the renovation’s sense of humor.
The bar is the social heart of the building, running from the Victorian mahogany interior out onto the broad porch and into the garden. Sunday Jazz Brunch draws locals as reliably as hotel guests. Happy hour runs Monday through Thursday, 2 to 5 p.m. The Columns is at 3811 St. Charles Avenue. Call (504) 899-9308.
Hotel Saint Vincent
The full history of Hotel Saint Vincent appears earlier in this guide, but it earns its place here, too. The five-building campus on Magazine Street was originally St. Vincent’s Infant Asylum, built in 1861 by Irish immigrant and philanthropist Margaret Haughery in response to the yellow fever epidemic that was leaving thousands of children without parents. The brick buildings, gargoyle clock tower, original Virgin Mary grotto, and the “St. Vincent’s Infant Asylum” header above the Magazine Street entrance are all intact.
The 75 rooms are spread across the campus in configurations that use the original floor plans of the orphanage buildings, which means high ceilings, brick walls, deep verandas, and interior courtyards that give the property a scale and privacy rare in any downtown hotel. The Chapel Club, built inside the original orphanage chapel, retains its stained-glass windows and adds a marble bar with a fuchsia velvet base. The courtyard is shaded and quiet in a way that makes the rest of Magazine Street feel very far away.
Hotel Saint Vincent is at 1507 Magazine Street in the Lower Garden District. Book at saintvincentnola.com.
The Marsh
A few blocks off St. Charles Avenue on Delachaise Street, The Marsh is the least architecturally dramatic entry on this list and the most useful if your priority is neighborhood access over grandeur. The 25-room boutique inn in the Milan neighborhood sits close enough to the Garden District to walk its streets comfortably, and within a few minutes of the St. Charles streetcar, Magazine Street shopping, Martin’s Wine Cellar, and some of Uptown’s best neighborhood restaurants, including The Delachaise and Superior Grill.
Rooms are clean, cozy, and individually decorated with an eclectic sensibility. Every guest receives a drink voucher at check-in, good for the on-site bar or coffee counter. Staff is frequently cited as the property’s strongest feature, running the place with genuine hospitality rather than front-desk formality. Free parking is available, which becomes a significant amenity in this part of the city. Rates stay accessible even as the surrounding neighborhood’s hotel options trend upward.
The Marsh is at 1901 Delachaise Street. Book at marshhotel.com.
