New Orleans is one of the most distinctive cities in the world, but like most American cities, rapidly developing. Designer and writer Valorie Hart and photographer Sara Essex Bradley have sought out spectacular residences that represent the best of old bohemian New Orleans—domiciles that serve both as inspiration and as an imaginative balm to all that is unappealingly conventional and cookie-cutter in design today. Ranging from a Garden District cottage to a Civil War–era Creole mansion, all the homes feature elements of elegance and eccentricity, old French furniture and vintage finds, colors only produced by local light. The free spirits who own these homes have a lust for all the arts, from music to dance, painting, and fine cuisine. They include an artist in a crumbling garret, an eccentric dreamer, a voodoo queen, moneyed wayfarers, world travelers, a resourceful magpie, bon vivants, gypsies, and old souls—all united in their love of the chipped and tattered, romantic and resplendent.
