Lyndsey Alley and Jenn Castro’s house in the riverfront Marigny district of New Orleans stops passersby in their tracks. With its Moorish-style front facade, including swooping column brackets that could set the scene for Othello, it’s no wonder the home has been featured in a local architectural guide and seems to be a regular stop for neighborhood tours. And that’s before you see its church-meets-loft interior.

$10,500 Principal Suite Sliding Door	$9,700 Plumbing Fixtures	$9,132 Loft Guardrail & Stair Handrail
$22,222 Gypsum Board & Interior Paint	$20,720 Kitchen Countertops & Cabinets	$12,000 Wood Flooring
$3,106 Brick Accent Wall	$8,800 Tile	$8,870 Electrical Fixtures
$5,685 Beams & Joists	$10,250 Fireplace	$306,472 Other Costs
Grand Total: $427,457

It made the perfect vacation home for Lyndsey, who lives today in Los Angeles, but came to New Orleans often while growing up in Virginia. “New Orleans was our Las Vegas,” he says. “I’ve been going my whole life. I love the food, the music, and New Orleans always has a heart.”

He also believed the Big Easy was an easier place to build. “If you were to have done this in California, it would have cost a fortune and taken years,” he says. “Doing this in a relatively short amount of time was super appealing.”

The original house, dating to the 1880s, was actually more Victorian-Louisianan than Moorish. Its long, thin shotgun-style plan is common to New Orleans, where residential lots have similar proportions, and in this warm climate, the shape is conducive to natural ventilation. Inside, the house was broken down into many small rooms and had been altered numerous times.

“We realized it’d be a complete remodel and thought it would be too much work,” Lyndsey explains. But Jenn got to wondering about its low ceilings, which seemed to camouflage a vaulted roof. “You could just see that this could be an amazing place,” she recalls. There was just a lot of unnecessary drywall in the way.

The clients wanted to maintain the house’s bones, but because it was a second home, “the design could be a little more playful,” architect Alec Adamick of Adamick Architecture explains.

After the drop ceiling was taken out, some of its lower horizontal beams had to remain for structural support. But an engineering analysis showed that only one-third would be necessary after the renovation.

The extra beams were re-positioned in a non-structural capacity, tilted upward in parallel to the roof slope to form a series of triangles with the remaining beams. The result is a striking combination of structural support and sculpture. The added interior volume created by the vaulted ceiling also enabled a series of eye-catching large chandeliers to be installed throughout the home.

Out front, the Moorish columns and brackets were restored to their original look. At Adamick’s suggestion, the couple considered building a two-story camel back–style addition at the rear of the house, which would have added equity. Instead, they favored a lighter hand, only expanding the original single-story, pitched-roof form further back, to add a loft and an additional bedroom.

For the wide-open feel of the great room, the clients sought inspiration from urban lofts: minimal with a bit of texture from a combination of industrial materials and natural wood.

“I think the goal was to be as minimal as possible,” interior designer Brooke Cranford explains. “It feels a bit California for New Orleans. But there are a lot of original details that we kept. A lot of people go into these New Orleans homes and gut them from front to back. That’s not what we did—I think it’s a happy medium.”

The side hall is a good example. The original house had an outdoor side gallery for circulation, which didn’t take up space in the already-thin shotgun house. In a later remodel, the gallery was enclosed as a hallway, with a tiny courtyard-like outdoor space maintained in between.

For the new remodel, which was completed in 2019 and brought the house to 2,000 square feet, the designers and the homeowners decided to keep what was there, simply adding a new stairway to the loft bedroom.

“It really is a nod to what this building’s form was historically,” Adamick says. “Now it’s one of the spaces that makes the house really unique.”

The design-construction team also repurposed some of the house’s other materials. Bricks from the front porch columns (part of an ill-advised earlier alteration of the Moorish original) and the back courtyard were halved, cleaned, and used to clad the kitchen island and backsplash.

In the new addition at the rear of the home, the design transitions to a more contemporary feel, with floor-to-ceiling glass in the master bedroom. “It just feels like a completely different house,” Lyndsey says of the addition, “not just from a spatial standpoint, but from a light standpoint.”

To extend the urban loft theme, a few touches of metal detailing were added throughout the house, such as stairway railings in the side hall. Yet the most metal-looking interior design choice is actually not metal at all: a 13-foot living room fireplace that was made from Venetian plaster by artist Diane Killeen.

“The fireplace was always going to be a metal look. We just weren’t sure how we were going to achieve it,” Cranford says. “Diane had been working on another project of mine, using Venetian plaster with a lime-based pigment. You get a darker pigment and it’s reflective. It’s a traditional technique that’s been used for hundreds of years.”

Why plaster instead of metal? It did save a modest amount of money, and was more practical. “With 12 or 13 feet it would have been a lot of weight to deal with,” Cranford explains. Yet she stresses the plaster wasn’t a second choice—most of all, it was a chance to add artful surprise.

The couple has traveled to New Orleans regularly since the home’s completion, as have a succession of family members and friends. The attraction may start with the city itself, but the house has a similarly universal, history-with-attitude appeal. “You’ll be with people in their twenties and their eighties beside you,” Jenn says “and you feel right at home.”

Related Reading:

Big Easy Living

4 Prefab Home Companies in Louisiana

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Adamick Architecture / @adamickarchitecture

Interior Designer: Brooke Cranford Design / @brookecranforddesign

Builder and Cabinetry Designer: Inhab Group

Structural Engineer: Heaslip Engineering

Landscape Design: Louisiana Land Art

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