The Whit: New Orleans' 'Haunted' Mansion Reopens as a Design Hotel

The 1857 Harris-Maginnis House on the corner of Prytania Street and Jackson Avenue in New Orleans' Garden District has reopened as The Whit, a hotel named for Walt Whitman, who spent three months in the city around the time of the home's construction.

The Greek Revival mansion carries a crowded résumé. Its first owner, a cotton merchant, died of yellow fever. A later owner was fatally struck by lightning. In the 21st century, a Tina Turner impersonator bought the property and ran it as Magnolia Mansion, a B&B with suites named Vampire Lovers' Lair and Moulin Rouge. A former professional boxer and a local politics kingmaker took over next; the venture collapsed around the time of an FBI raid on the property.

USA Today once named it, in its B&B years, one of the top places in the nation "to sleep with a ghost." Guests reported eerie sensations — somebody tucking them in at night, a presence watching them sleep, mysterious footsteps, slamming doors. Lore accumulated; the house joined the city's ghost-tour circuit. The new owners inherited gothic-coded wall murals and dark purple velvet at every turn.

How do you redesign a haunt?

Gretchen Trauth, CEO of the New Orleans investment firm behind the hotel, brought in Jensen Killen and Katie Logan Leblanc of Logan Killen, a local design firm known for mixing polish and patina.

"The goal was a hotel where nobody can quite tell whether a designer has touched it," Leblanc said.

"We wanted it to feel very storied, like it's been someone's house for a long time," Killen added. "There are these layered histories imbued in the furnishings and the art and accessories."

Architect Seamus McGuire of New Orleans firm Cicada handled historical codes and redrew the plan. His blueprint converted three bedrooms into lounges. The mahogany-paneled library now displays antique dog portraits and stocks volumes from local independent Faulkner House Books. "It's dark and moody and where you might want to have a cocktail or a whiskey," Leblanc said of the clubby room. The breakfast room wears Pierre Frey Les Colonnes wallpaper and matching curtains.

The main lounge proved hardest. "It's a giant space that isn't always in use, and can be tricky to give life to when it's empty," Killen said. The team layered in blue paint that reads ethereal by day and warm by night, a custom grid carpet, and a salon-style wall of works by Louisiana artists including Robert Moreland and Mallory Page.

The second-floor bar posed a different constraint: landmark rules forbid faking a history a space never had, so the team went openly Deco. "What we don't want is to put a contemporary bar into a very historic property," McGuire said. "You can't give a false sense of history to a space."

The bedrooms resist uniformity: a quartet of garden rooms with low ceilings and glossy oxblood walls, three airy cabana rooms with bamboo beds and high ceilings, plus classically designed units. "It's not meant to feel like everything was changed by the same person at the same time," Killen said.

What does this change for the building? The ghosts, at least, appear to have checked out. As for the supposed spirits, nobody's heard boo.