City: New Orleans, LA

Category: Tours & Attractions

Telephone: (504) 525-5661

Description: Noted New Orleans architect James Gallier Jr. built this elegant French Quarter town house for his wife and four small daughters in 1857, a time when the young designer was eager to execute his innovative ideas about residential comfort and convenience. For example, because ventilation was important for comfort during New Orleans’ long hot summers, Gallier incorporated a skylight and ceiling vents into his 19th-century design, which can still be seen in this completely restored house-museum.The exterior has typical Creole cast-iron work, while the interior blends a traditional town house floor plan with Gallier’s own ingenuity, such as the composite columns and the unusual plaster cornice work of the double parlor. The collection includes a complete bedroom suite by master cabinetmaker Prudent Mallard and parlor chairs by John Henry Belter. Gallier’s eclectic and stylish design reflects the latest of Victorian taste, with fine New Orleans-made mahogany and rosewood furniture, colorful wool carpets woven on antique looms in England, period French wallpaper, and hand-painted window shades. Utilitarian items such as a cypress icebox, ironing equipment, and a fly-catch also. A National Historic Landmark and hailed by the New York Times as “one of the best small museums in the country,” Gallier House offers unique insights into the lifestyle of a bygone era. The museum complex includes two adjacent 1830s commercial buildings converted into exhibit space for Victorian art and a museum shop. Gallier was also the designer of one of the city’s most elaborate facilities, the famous French Opera House, which was destroyed by fire in 1919, as well as the Bank of America building, built in 1866 on Exchange Place and probably the first in New Orleans to have a structural cast-iron front, and the Florence A. Luling House, built in 1865 and later used as the Jockey Club. Docents lead 45- to 60-minute tours Mon and Fri 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Sat noon to 3 p.m.