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(Photograph by Gerald Moorhead )
Beaumont's fascination with New Orleans and south Louisiana as a source of architectural identity was reinforced in the 1970s and 1980s by Baton Rouge architect A. Hays Town. Town was an eclectic master, who, until nearly the end of his one-hundred-and-one-year life in 2005, designed new houses based on historic Louisiana prototypes. This house, located in the Park on Thomas Road subdivision developed in the 1980s, sits at the end of a cul-de-sac. It is a Spanish Creole courtyard house organized in an L plan around a rear patio and approached through an arched porte-cochere.
Town also designed the house of 1986 at 4335 Thomas Park. For these two clients and a third, Town had designed a trio of adjoining houses at 1350, 1340, and 1330 Audubon Place in 1968, 1970, and 1974, respectively. Each reflects a different facet of nineteenth-century Louisiana bayou country domestic architecture. Into the early twenty-first century, the hipped-roof Creole cottage and the Creole planter's house remain favored models for expensive new houses in Beaumont.