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The Mansion on Royal was built in the 1850s,
and it's been standing on this corner ever since.

Greek Revival, columns out front, galleries above — the kind of house built when this was still the edge of the city. Southern mansions of the era meant fourteen-foot ceilings, hand-crafted cypress trim, and courtyards that hosted prominent New Orleans families for the better part of two centuries. Step into this piece of New Orleans history and travel back two hundred years.

Today it's nine suites and a boutique hotel, but the house is still the house. Krewe du Vieux rolls past the front door every Mardi Gras, and Frenchmen Street is four blocks away. The neighborhood is eminently walkable — three coffee shops on the street alone, plus restaurants and bars in every direction

The mansion's story begins with a family who embodied New Orleans' golden age. In the mid-nineteenth century, this was America's third-largest city — the commercial capital of the South, where cotton, sugar, and river trade built fortunes, and fortunes built grand houses. Among the merchants who rose with the city was John Cordes, born in Bremen, Germany in 1830, who arrived as a grocer and climbed to partner in Lochle & Cordes Wholesale Liquor, supplying the saloons, restaurants, and grand hotels of a city that has never once lost its thirst. At the height of that boom, Cordes built his mansion at the corner of Royal and Spain — a grand Greek Revival statement in the heart of the Faubourg Marigny, with soaring fourteen-foot ceilings, hand-carved cypress trim, double parlors made for entertaining, and courtyards designed for the long tropical evenings. Here he raised his daughters as the neighborhood filled with the Creole, German, and Irish merchant families who gave the Marigny its soul. The mansion stands today as the Cordes family knew it — a place where guests don't just read about the era that built New Orleans, but sleep inside it.

Stay a weekend or stay a month — either way, you're not just passing through. You're living a chapter of the house's story.

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