Hotel Henrietta

Simon Hernsheim, a tobacco merchant, built himself a house on St Charles Avenue in 1883, and it is now the Columns Hotel. Hotel Henrietta, a few blocks away, is the Columns' younger sibling, named after his sister, and the first hotel built on the avenue in thirty years. It is new from the ground up: five storeys of pink stucco, an arched colonnade at street level and deep galleries above, the city's old balconies drawn again in plain curves. Under the arches the floor is checked green and charcoal tile. Inside, the lounge has a herringbone oak ceiling, like a parquet floor gone up a storey, over a wall of green lacquer hung with prints and an old portrait of a woman in a lace cap. Upstairs it is rust velvet: a channelled headboard the length of the wall, and a green armchair at a window full of treetops.

Recommended for anyone who would rather come home to Uptown than to the French Quarter, and for families who need a kitchen and a connecting door. Twenty-four of the forty rooms are suites with kitchenettes, and either kind connects to a Double Queen that sleeps six by itself. Cots come on request, and the washer and dryer are free. There is no restaurant, which in New Orleans is no hardship. The day goes from bagels in the Avenue Room to the lobby bar, and dinner is wherever the streetcar is going. From the upper balconies on the avenue side the view runs over the treetops to downtown and the Mississippi, and every room has a bar of its own for the purpose.