Eric Roland doesn’t mind being a little contrarian. “People love historic New Orleans charm, and I’m not saying I hate it,” says the longtime resident of the city. “But it’s not my favorite.” That was clear back in 2021, when he was on the hunt for a two-family home that he could turn into an owner-occupied house with a rental apartment. He found a two-story, two-unit brick building just a block and a half from streetcar-lined St. Charles Avenue and the stately Garden District. The gable-sided home with a half-moon attic window had been a characteristically neglected rental owned by an absentee landlord. The structure was perfect, but the style? “I’m on the younger spectrum, so it’s kind of the old school/new school divide going on,” Eric says. “I like clean lines. I don’t like anything circular. I even hated the gable roof.”

Nevertheless, he paid $495,000 for the roughly 2,500-square-foot building and started to form a vision for the place. An entrepreneur who owns a courier service as well as a fashion start-up and a screen-printing and embroidery company, Eric had a few specific ideas in mind: First, he wanted to install a glass-paneled garage door on the second floor that would open to a balcony, allowing for a style of fluid indoor/outdoor living fitting for the warm New Orleans climate. Second, he wanted to bring the stairs outside, removing the indoor stairway to free up interior square footage for the apartments.

Searching for a designer to figure out how to make the transformation a reality, Eric found Nathan Fell and realized he had been gobsmacked by another house he had happened to come across earlier that was designed by the architect. The two jelled immediately. “There’s thinking that you are a tastemaker because you have an Instagram account, and then there’s actually having good insight for how things work together,” Fell says of Eric. Armed with a roughly $50,000 budget, Fell found a way to create two apartments with the owner’s unit on the ground floor (left untouched during the project) and a renovated rental with the desired balcony, on the second. He also brought unity to the facade by adding the home’s signature, a black wooden screen that encloses the stair on one side and the balcony on the other.

$7,000 Foundation	$15,000 Treated Lumber	$1,000 Paint
$2,500 Metal Stringers	$3,000 Cedar Lumber	$2,000 Steel Post
$1,500 Wood Connectors	$500 Nails, Screws, Etc.	$15,000 Labor (Framing & Paint)
$2,000 Labor (Ironwork)	$6,000 Unforeseen Expenses
Grand Total: $55,500

They got it done because two factors were on their side. The house fell just outside a historic district, which meant fewer hoops to jump through during the renovation than with a building protected by the city’s notoriously strict preservation laws. It also had a protruding porch—with awkwardly oversize Greek Revival details—added in the 1980s that the two were sure no one would miss.

“If I had a dollar for everyone who told me how beautiful the house is, I’d probably have made back my renovation money by now.”
—Eric Roland, homeowner

Eric maxed out a $25,000 credit card on materials and put his own labor into painting and demolition to stay within his budget, though contractors had to be hired to install steel stringers and posts for the porch structure, frame the wood, and pour a new concrete foundation for the addition. By the time the renovation was completed, Eric had moved into his girlfriend’s house, so he rented out the finished second-floor apartment on Airbnb to pay down the construction costs and save money to renovate the ground-floor unit, where he plans to live.

The next phase may take a while, but Eric has already achieved one thing: hiding the original roofline. “When you look at it, the screen gives you the illusion that the house is squared all the way through,” he says. “The gable was going to kill me if I had to look at it on a regular basis. It was just gonna kill me.”

Project Credits:

Architecture: Nathan Fell Architecture / @nathanfellarchitecture

Structural Engineering: Howard Engineering

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