Cambria Hotel New Orleans Downtown Warehouse District

The Louisiana Landmarks Society gave the Cambria an award for excellence in historic preservation, which is going some for a building put up on a former parking lot. The lot was an awkward shape and the height limit was 65 feet, and Holly & Smith Architects answered both in brick, steel and glass, drawn to keep the rhythm and the bulk of the old warehouses around it. The result is a block of dark red brick and tall windows that looks as if it has been on Tchoupitoulas Street for some time. Next door, a red brick garage has PARK down its front in tall letters, so the street has not given up parking altogether.

Inside, the hotel goes to New Orleans for its decoration and does not hold back. In the lounge by the lifts a wall is painted navy, with THE BIG EASY across it in blue neon under a pressed-tin ceiling, and on the backs of the wingback chairs are skulls wearing crowns. A King room was ours for one night in October. Upstairs, black and white damask goes up behind the bed, and a crystal chandelier hangs from a bare concrete ceiling. The skulls turn up again in the bathroom, worked into the damask of the shower curtain, beside white subway tile and a framed photograph of a trombone and a sousaphone at work.

Most of what a first visit to New Orleans wants is on foot from here. The French Quarter is 0.4 miles away, and so is the National WWII Museum; the river is nearer still, with a steamboat cruise to take on it and a rooftop bar a few minutes' walk away for looking at it. The Warehouse District itself was nineteenth-century warehouses before it was galleries, and two of its museums, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Contemporary Arts Center, are neighbours, which leaves the morning for art and the evening for the Quarter.

Back at the hotel, U Bar and Restaurant is the one place to eat and drink: a horseshoe bar of red stools against bare brick, with a fleur-de-lis on the wall in case anyone forgets which city this is. Breakfast is cooked to order and paid for separately. The daily amenity fee takes 15% off dinner there, and the gym, yoga equipment included, opens to a room key at any hour. The fee also buys a swim, in season and when there is room, in a rooftop pool somewhere else, which is as close as the Cambria comes to having one.