Two remarkable figures, across different centuries, called this raised center-hall Creole cottage home, and you are looking at one of the finest examples of the form in New Orleans. The house was built in 1826 for auctioneer Joseph Le Carpentier, a wealthy businessman who moved in social circles that included Napoleon's chess partner. General P.G.T. Beauregard, the Confederate commander who ordered the first shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter in 1861, rented the house in 1865 after returning to New Orleans as a defeated general.
Beauregard, a Louisiana Creole educated at West Point, had been one of the South's most celebrated military figures; after the war he worked as a railroad executive and, controversially, advocated for political rights for Black Louisianans, a position that made him a pariah in much of the postwar South. The second famous resident was Frances Parkinson Keyes, a prolific novelist who purchased the house in the 1940s and used it as her New Orleans home while writing novels set in Louisiana Creole society. She restored the house and its formal garden, preserved the period furnishings, and left the property as a historic house museum.
The lush walled garden behind the house, visible from the gate, is one of the most serene private spaces in the French Quarter.