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"He told me it was called the Lalaurie house, so I wrote it down and went to Barnes & Noble," said Stassi-Scott. "I asked if they had any books about it, and they said, 'Just look in the haunted house section.' "My initial reaction: 'Oh no, what have I gotten myself into.'" Stassi-Scott is a deeply spiritual person. The idea of hanging drapes and picking paint colors in a place haunted -- at worst by tortured souls, at best by a tortured history -- did not sit well. "I do believe in good and bad spirits," she said. "I was pregnant at the time, so I went to St. Michael's Church in Houston and got a bottle of holy water. Every time I went to Lalaurie, I would say my prayers and put on the holy water. It was my perfume." All good ghost stories start with a kernel of truth. In the case of the Lalaurie house, horrible things indeed happened in the early 1830s at the corner of Royal and Gov. Nichols (then called Hospital) streets. The mistress of the house back then was Delphine Macarty Lalaurie, a true Jekyll-and-Hyde, if historical sources are to be trusted.
Born when New Orleans was still under Spanish rule, she was a member of the white, French Creole upper crust: wealthy, connected, socially gracious and seriously deranged. Lalaurie bought the property for $33,750 in 1831, with a 8-percent mortgage over two years, according to "Madame Lalaurie, Mistress of the Haunted House" (University Press of Florida), a meticulously researched, nonfiction work by Carolyn Morrow Long. In 1834, a fire swept through the house, and neighbors rushed to the rescue. In rooms above the kitchen in an outbuilding, they discovered seven chained slaves near death from torture and starvation. Newspaper reporters of the day didn't hold back in their gruesome chronicling of the scene, describing holes in a slave's head, maggots in wounds, bloody welts from whips and other atrocities. Infuriated by the sight, a mob stormed the mansion, ripping out walls and ransacking furnishings. (Read the original 1834 report from the New Orleans Bee newspaper here.)
After the fire, more tales of Lalaurie's cruelty surfaced, including a separate incident in which she reportedly chased a slave girl with a whip until the terrified youngster jumped to her death from the roof. With her neighbors up in arms, Madame Lalaurie didn't stick around the French Quarter for long. She escaped by carriage and eventually made her way to Paris, where she lived the rest of her life, in denial, according to Morrow Long's research, about the things she'd done. A haunted past, an elegant present The house at 1140 Royal St. has changed dramatically since the days when Lalaurie lived there. The three-story building that today sits flush with the sidewalk is a formidable structure, painted the color of storm clouds and ringed by wrought-iron galleries. It's believed the third floor was added around 1837, when the home went through one of its many renovations. Much of its architectural detailing likely dates from then, including elaborate ceiling medallions, carved doors, Greek columns and an intricate frieze of winged angels in the dining room, one of the home's most stunning features.
Given the permutations that the property has undergone over the decades, it seems indeed miraculous that such details survived. Over its 181 years, the 10,000-square-foot mansion and its former slave quarters have been chopped up and pieced back together at least a half dozen times, serving as a private residence, a girls' school, a furniture store, rental apartments, a homeless shelter and then back to a private residence. When ghost stories began to swirl shortly after the 1834 fire, the Lalaurie mansion unwittingly became a French Quarter landmark. Today, it remains a gold mine for ghost tours, some of which are prone to exaggerate the already horrific story. (Across the street, the wall surrounding a neighbor's house shows bears the brunt of shoes rubbing against stucco. Tour groups often rest against the wall as they settle in for embellished tales of murder and woe.) Among the Lalaurie house's most famous (living) occupants in recent years was Nicholas Cage, who bought the property in 2006 for $3.4 million, but soon ran into financial troubles.
He lost it to foreclosure in 2009. When Whalen bought the house in 2010, it was in desperate need of renovation, Stassi-Scott said. "By the time we got in there, the plaster walls were coming off. In the dining room, the angel relief was falling away." The wooden interior doors, carved with fancy floral patterns, were in good shape and only needed repainting. "Downstairs, the black-and-white tile already existed, and we just polished it," Stassi-Scott said. "We also refinished the wooden floors. With the decor, Stassi-Scott aimed to find a counterbalance for the home's weighty history, playing off the past while giving the rooms a contemporary edge. In the kitchen, she painted the woodwork a shiny black as a striking contrast to a carrara marble island and earthy, flesh-toned walls. The round kitchen table, also marble, is surrounded by Louis XVI-style chairs upholstered in a Fortuny-like fabric with a skull motif. "That fabric was one of the first things I found for this project," Stassi-Scott said.
"It's beautiful and elegant, and when I saw the skulls, I thought, 'Oh my gosh, that's the fabric for Lalaurie.'" The kitchen flows into the dining room, where the walls are soft gray, the plaster work, including the angel frieze, is bright white, the drapes are silver silk, and the seats of the dining chairs are python skin. In a corner, sits an 18th-century Italian tabernacle she found at Karla Katz antiques on Magazine Street. "I wanted a few special pieces to bring in God," Stassi-Scott said. "With the angels in that room, it just felt heavenly and spiritual and had a positive energy." Across the hall, a parlor is a masculine, texture-rich retreat, with a white, patterned rug in cowhide, Christopher Guy arm chairs upholstered in cream cashmere and a scarlet velvet sofa. A spiral staircase leads to the third floor, where two of the bedrooms have a dark edge. One has lacquered walls the color of claret; the other is wallpapered in a dark royal blue Harlequin pattern from the Italian design brand Dedar Milano.
A massive four-poster bed in the blue bedroom is another of Scott's designs. "We wanted the house to have a sexy French Quarter feel," she said. But there was a deeper motive for some of Stassi-Scott's design decisions. The smallest bedroom is a peaceful escape from the dark, done all in white and cream. She calls it the "heaven room." At the beginning of the project, a real estate agent had mentioned to Stassi-Scott that this room was the spot where the slaves had been tortured (though historical accounts say the slaves were found in an outbuilding.) "I'm a highly sensitive person, and I felt spooked in that room," she said. "I hated going in there, and now it's one of my favorite places. I wanted it to feel like you were up in the clouds. "With all the gruesome tales I've read about this house -- how much is true I don't know -- but how horrific if these people really suffered these things," she said. "I just wanted to create a safe haven, a beautiful place for them to be.