New Orleans Grows Up

In the morning over coffee in the hotel’s courtyard, I am serenaded by a jazz band playing next door, just on the other side of a decorative iron gate. It’s a continuation of the unwavering, incandescent hum of the city’s joie de vivre, the soundtrack of a place that is never quite quiet. Yet somehow from my perch, it feels innately tranquil, like a well-cared-for private home.

Indeed, that was The Celestine’s original purpose, having been constructed as an elegant private residence in 1791. Its history since then has been long and storied, with significant chapters as the private home of Antoine Amédée Peychaud, the creator of Peychaud’s Bitters, and later as a boarding house and hotel, the Maison Deville, which served as a favorite writing spot of the great playwright, Tennessee Williams. Legend has it that it was here in the courtyard, where I find myself listening to the neighbor’s melodies, that Williams penned his famous work, A Streetcar Named Desire.

The Celestine burst from this history in 2024, when the building was restored to the intoxicating blend of NOLA grandeur and grit that permeates throughout the city, and coats everything in a mix of its own genre of noir.

The hotel is the embodiment of this genre of noir, and has established itself in the French Quarter as a rare beauty, markedly different from other, more famous, hostelries around Bourbon Street, such as the Hotel Monteleone with its hundreds of rooms, rotating Carousel Bar, and guests ready to drink their way through the Big Easy. Not to say that guests at The Celestine don’t arrive thirsty, and with plans to head straight to Preservation Hall, they just go about it all a little quieter, a little more sophisticated, a little more, well, grown up.

It’s all part of the careful handiwork of Róbert LeBlanc, a Louisiana native who has been helping to move the needle on how visitors and New Orleanians alike, view, use, stay, and party in the city. In 2020, LeBlanc opened his first hotel here, The Chloe, a grand dame of a mansion in Uptown, a largely residential neighborhood which had previously been largely devoid of places to stay other than the occasional bed and breakfast and a Hilton Garden Inn.

LeBlanc and his team transformed the 1890s mansion from what had been a tired inn into the city’s low-key, veritable it spot, where locals come for lunch and dinner, and for visitors to the city, documenting an afternoon spent lounging around the pool is a social media requirement—although in a tasteful Instagram post perhaps, not necessarily for the TikTok set.

LeBlanc likes to use “sense of terroir” to describe his hotel ethos. To give guests “a sense of what it’s like to not just visit New Orleans, but what it feels like to actually live in New Orleans.” The rooms at his properties are larger than typical hotel rooms. They’re full of curiosities, comfortable couches, and places to write a play or talk into the wee hours, cocktail in hand. His hotels are definitely the center of their own worlds, their own parties, rather than background guests at a bigger affair.

At The Chloe there is constant music, something between a club and a coffee shop. The couches downstairs in the various parlors, original to the once private home’s architecture, are filled with people working away on their laptops or sipping an afternoon cocktail. At night, the bistro lights switch on the front lawn, and I settle into dinner at a long communal table that feels more local dinner party at a grand mansion than restaurant at a hotel. It’s intoxicating—with or without a Sazerac.

Late this year LeBlanc will take on a different terroir, with plans to open The Chloe Nashville in the Tennessee city’s Hillsboro Village neighborhood. And just as The Chloe and The Celestine in New Orleans keep a little distance from the fracas of Bourbon Street, The Chloe Nashville is sure to introduce a party of its own design, one just a little different from the honey-tonks on Lower Broadway.