Beauregard-Keyes House

Auctioneer Joseph Le Carpentier purchased this lot from the Ursuline nuns and hired Baltimore-born Correjolles (1795–1864) to design his house. James Lambert was the builder. After 1833, the house had a succession of owners and residents, among them Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard, who rented rooms here for eighteen months in 1866–1868. From 1944 to 1955, popular novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes leased the house, where she wrote a book about Beauregard, Madame Castel’s Lodger (1962). She began restoration of the house with Richard Koch in 1945 and in 1955 created the Keyes Foundation, which acquired ownership at her death in 1970. Constructed of plastered brick, the raised house combines the American central-hall plan with the Creole open gallery, or loggia (now enclosed), flanked by cabinets at the rear. At the front, curved granite twin staircases rise to pedimented, four-columned Tuscan portico and the double doors that open to the principal living area. For its time, this is an unusual and sophisticated design within the Vieux Carré; the newly fashionable classical elements were perhaps influenced by Correjolles’s East Coast background. The side walled garden is laid out in parterres, based on an 1865 drawing in the City’s Notarial Archive that shows a design from that period. The garden can be viewed from Chartres Street. The house is open to the public.