A restored 1860s townhouse, now a museum
Gallier House, on Royal Street in New Orleans' French Quarter, is a restored 1860s townhouse built by architect James Gallier Jr. for his own family, now run as a museum. Completed in 1860 with early hot-and-cold running water, it is best known today for furnished period rooms and its 2022 appearance as a vampire's mansion on television.
Gallier Jr. built a house ahead of its time
Gallier House is a restored nineteenth-century home, now a museum on Royal Street in the French Quarter. From this point, it sits just beside, part of a quiet stretch of the Quarter near Chartres Street.
James Gallier Jr. designed the house for himself, and he was the son of James Gallier Sr., an Irish-born architect famous across New Orleans for buildings like Gallier Hall. In 1849, the elder Gallier handed his business to his son, and Gallier Jr. Built a career of his own. In 1853, he married Josephine Aglaé Villavaso, from St. Bernard Parish. Construction on the house began in 1857. By 1860, Gallier Jr. Moved in with Josephine and their four daughters.
The house was ahead of its time. It had running hot and cold water, an experimental skylight, and a copper bathtub, all rare comforts for the 1850s. Gallier Jr. Designed the front gate himself and had it painted a shade called "Paris Green," unlike the catalog ironwork common elsewhere in the Quarter. A rear wing held a separate kitchen and quarters for four enslaved people who worked in the household.
A rooming house became a National Historic Landmark museum
After Gallier Jr.'s death, the house passed out of the family. By the early twentieth century, it had become a rooming house, its rooms rented out to strangers. In the mid-1960s, preservation architects Koch and Wilson restored it for the Freeman family. The Ella West Freeman Foundation then turned it into a museum, which opened to visitors in 1971. The federal government named it a National Historic Landmark in 1974. The Freeman Foundation gave the property to Tulane University in 1986, and in 1996 the Woman's Exchange took over as steward.
Guides show rooms furnished as they looked in the 1850s
The two museums have been managed together ever since, as the Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses. Guides walk visitors through rooms furnished as they would have looked in the 1850s, from the double parlor to Gallier Jr. 's skylit office upstairs. The courtyard garden behind the house was researched and replanted by New Orleans Town Gardeners back in 1969, and it still frames the view from the rear windows.
A television vampire borrowed the Gallier facade in 2022
In 2022, the cameras came for a different story. AMC's series "Interview with the Vampire" used the house's exterior to stand in for the mansion of Madame Lalaurie, New Orleans' most notorious antebellum villain, infamous for the torture of enslaved people in her own home across town. Gallier House never belonged to the Lalaurie family and never hosted the crimes tied to that name. The production simply needed a French Quarter façade from the right period, and this one fit.
Gallier House remains a museum today, one of the most intact house museums of its era anywhere in the city. Visitors can still see the copper bathtub, the cast-iron range, and the green-painted gate James Gallier Jr. Designed for his own front door.
Gallier House stands much as the architect left it, a private home turned into a public record of how one New Orleans family lived in 1860.
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