June 2011. A little house that makes a big impact

Back in 1992, Kevin LeBlanc spent his summer tearing down an old house around the corner from his parents’ home in Port Allen. Sweating every step of the way, he dismantled it and hauled it in pieces to his family’s property.

“It was a little old 1890s cypress house that had been used as a doctor’s office,” he says. “It was falling apart. I got it for free, but I had to move it. I tore the whole thing down and made stacks of the beautiful materials. I salvaged the six-over-six [panes] cypress windows and the old cypress clapboard.

“It was the middle of the summer, and I was dripping wet, but I was just hell-bent on taking it apart. Now I think, ‘How did I do that?’ But I had to go through the messy part. I had such a drive to create this little structure.”

“This little structure” is a charming Creole-style cottage, topped with a corrugated tin roof, that LeBlanc constructed from the original materials with the help of a builder. Only five hundred square feet, it feels bigger owing to the careful design and the soothing palette of beige and “dull green” with which he has decorated and furnished it.

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Click the small image to open a gallery of photos. All photos by Ruth Laney. “I wanted that little Creole-cottage look,” says LeBlanc, who studied interior design at LSU and now works full time as an artist, painting landscapes in acrylic. “The house was also a nod to cottages on plantations on the west side of the river.

“I’m a frustrated architect,” says LeBlanc, who drew up the plans himself. “All the windows are lined up to have the light come in.” To the six original windows, he added a smaller one, an estate-sale find, over the kitchen sink. One living-room window lines up with the door. LeBlanc, who had plenty of time to shop during the year the house was being built, found the c.1860 glass-paned double doors at a salvage place in Lafayette. “They were a perfect fit,” he says.

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