CHECKING IN AT HOTEL SAINT VINCENT

I’m back in New York after a long weekend in New Orleans. I don’t remember much from my visits as a kid, but I do remember sitting on the screened porch at my great grandparents’ house, and the slight breeze that shifted the humid air ever so slightly. I remember sitting on the floor at Preservation Hall, the first instance of what would become a lifelong love affair with live jazz. And I remember the whoops and hollers and parades through the street after the Saints won their home game.

For me, New Orleans was always less about Bourbon Street and more about the porches, the music, the people — the feeling of all of it happening at once.

I was excited to go back as an adult this time, and when I went to look for a hotel, wanted something that felt like New Orleans. That’s how I stumbled on Hotel Saint Vincent, a 75-room boutique hotel, housed in the former St. Vincent Infant Asylum, built in 1861 at the height of New Orleans’s Yellow Fever epidemic.

Hotel Saint Vincent sits on Magazine Street in the Lower Garden District, the side of New Orleans with the tree-lined streets, Victorian mansions, and boutique stores. The building feels almost imposing when you first arrive — a towering, three-story brick structure that feels heavy next to some of the smaller buildings beside it — the kind of weight that comes from having been an institution, and now, in a different way, still is.

In 2017, the property was acquired by hotelier Liz Lambert and her partners at McGuire Moorman Lambert Hospitality, who led a $20 million restoration before reopening it in 2021. The design, a collaboration between Lambert McGuire Design and local architecture firm Metro Studio, focused on preserving the building’s 19th-century bones — the brick facade, the ironwork, the central staircase — while layering in Italian, mid-century, and New Orleans vernacular influences. Much of the furniture feels collected rather than installed, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

Between two bars, a restaurant, a cafe, a boutique, and a courtyard pool, it feels as much like a place for locals to hang out as it does a place to stay. It’d be easy to spend an entire day here. (We did.)

We started the morning at the on-site cafe, Elizabeth Street Bakery, and took our Vietnamese coffees out to the courtyard pool. A jazz band set up nearby for brunch — we heard them before we saw them, the horn drifting over before we thought to look up. By late afternoon we’d moved to the veranda with cocktails, and by evening into San Lorenzo, the hotel’s Italian restaurant, before filtering through to Chapel Club, a dimly lit bar occupying the building’s original chapel, with live music on weekends and tasteful nudes adorning the walls.

Everything at Hotel Saint Vincent has a story — and the best adaptive reuse projects know the difference between what to leave untouched, what to reveal, and what to extend into something new. Every choice here feels considered. The original staircase rises three full floors. The front porch ironwork looks like it was never touched. Vintage furniture pulls from Art Deco grandeur and Italianate motifs. Even the marbled wallpaper in the bathrooms is drawn from diaries kept by Margaret, who ran the orphanage.

Like New Orleans itself, Hotel Saint Vincent feels richly layered. At one point we left our room late at night for a nightcap, and the ground floor was glowing — candelabras and tea lights set against red neon, locals mixed in with hotel guests, everything happening at once, but somehow holding together.

This is what New Orleans feels like.

If you’re planning a trip to New Orleans (or anywhere), send me a note and we’ll get you onto LINEAR Concierge. Hotel Saint Vincent is part of our collection — subscribers get access to curated stays, member rates, and a handful of perks.

In no particular order, a few places that stuck with me:

• Saint Germaine — a French-inspired tasting menu in a double shotgun house in Bywater. The evening progresses from backyard to bar to dining room. Don’t miss this one.

• Camp Place Residence — worth a quick detour if you’re nearby. A quieter example of how new architecture tries to sit inside the city’s older fabric.

• Petula — a courtyard cafe and wine bar tucked inside KREWE in the French Quarter. An unexpected move from an eyewear brand, but it works.

• Turkey and the Wolf and Molly’s Rise & Shine — chaotic, playful, and a bit closer to the version of New Orleans I’m describing here

We also made stops at Cochon and Pêche — both worth it, and good anchors for the city’s more rooted side.

Grab a coffee from French Truck and take the St. Charles streetcar down to Audubon and back. We did this on a rainy day — watching the houses pass by felt especially right. Bonus points if you spot the church designed by Leonard Spangenberg, a former Taliesin Fellow. It’s hard to miss.

Headed to London next. More soon.

A few new additions to the archive this week — Vipp’s Upstate Shelter, a hospitality-inspired coworking space in London, and a new hotel in Berlin.

This week, I’m pulling a project from the archive to look at what AMAA calls non-finito — unfinished.

In a 2021 lecture to students in the Syracuse Architecture program, the cofounders describe their process less as designing and more as uncovering. It’s a trap, they argue, to rely on drawings as a final truth. Spend enough time peeling back layers, reading traces, and the building begins to show you what it wants.

Caffè Nazionale is set inside the 19th-century town hall of Arzignano, the ideal place to build around a philosophy like AMAA’s. Unlike its more preserved neighbors, Arzignano has been shaped by 20th-century industry, uneven growth, and layers of history stretching back to the Neolithic. There’s no single dominant narrative to defer to, no obvious “correct” version of the building to restore toward. Its identity is exactly what AMAA works with.

There's an inherent temporality in this kind of intervention. To reveal the patina — to expose those layers — is to acknowledge that the building isn’t finished. Not now, not ever. Life goes on.

We’re planning trips to Japan, Mexico City, London, LA, New York, and Palm Springs — concierge@linear-magazine.com

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THE SPACES AND PLACES BELOW WERE SELECTED FOR THEIR:

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You’re reading Linear Magazine, a publication for the Architecturally Curious™. We help you explore the world through architecture and design, curating unique spaces, stays, and places, and highlighting what makes them special.

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You’re reading Linear Magazine, a publication for the Architecturally Curious™. We help you explore the world through architecture and design, curating unique spaces, stays, destinations, and experiences and highlighting what makes them special.

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