August 2010. You Can't Argue with Baby Birds: And other reasons why Mitchell Gaudet and Erica Larkin took on the transformation of a lakeside home Katrina knocked off its feet.

Hurricane Katrina’s driven water forced the house off its thirteen-foot high pilings and floated it forward two feet, thus leaving it slightly off center, yet here it sits almost five years later, majestically hugging the peaceful water of Bayou Sauvage like nothing ever happened. “This is a house that refused to be destroyed,” explained Mitchell Gaudet, a well-known glass sculptor who owns Studio Inferno on Royal Street in New Orleans, as he talks about the house he owns with his fiancée Erica Larkin, a metal sculptor/furniture designer.

It’s located just off Highway 90 near the Chef Pass Bridge in Eastern New Orleans. “Maybe it was the wildlife that took up refuge in the house after Katrina that made me decide and say out loud, ‘This would be a great place to live,’ even though it was a wreck. How could I argue with the baby birds who nested in the open wall?”

At the time Gaudet and Larkin were living just steps away from Studio Inferno in the Bywater neighborhood. “The house had been vacant for two years after Katrina when my father, Ivy, a semi-retired carpenter, told me about it,” Gaudet recalled. “My first impression of the house was that the peaceful setting was awesome. The property is wrapped in the 22,265-acre Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge.” Comprised of fresh and brackish marshes, all within the city limits of New Orleans, it’s the nation’s largest urban wildlife refuge and just twenty minutes from the French Quarter.

Gaudet contacted the owner, who built the house in 1995, to negotiate purchasing it. Then began the massive task of stabilizing and renovating. With the help of his father, his assistant Carlton Young and Erica, the next year was spent working on the house.

“To forgo arguments,” Gaudet continued with a smile, “we set up a division of labor, I was designated as the point person for all exterior work, while Erica was in charge of the interior.” One of the first chores was raising the house to fourteen feet because it is outside of the flood protection levees.

“We first thought we were creating a camp for fishing and parties,” Larkin said. “It became our primary home after we spent the first night in it and we have both been in love with our quiet retreat ever since. However, it is still an ideal spot for fishing or to throw a great party. We have upper and lower decks facing the bayou. The lower deck also serves as a boat dock.”

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