“A butler?!” we all exclaimed when we saw the assignment. The Audubon Cottages, a deluxe cottage hotel in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter, reopened in March 2012 under the auspices of The New Orleans Hotel Collection. Among its many amenities, the hotel boasts the services of a French Quarter Butler. What could that entail? A somber gent suffering in formal attire holding a tray of drinks waiting for us to be thirsty? A wisecracking Jeeves that will accompany us on capers? An Alfred to our Batman? Could whoever it was live up to our already heightened expectations?
Remarkably so. We met our butler Roderick Bernal at the Dauphine Orleans parking garage. He seemed visibly relieved that we had made it; the parking attendant said he’d been checking with him all afternoon. Still in a bit of traffic shock from driving in the Quarter—an afternoon rainstorm had only served to stir up the Bourbon street revelers getting a leg up on a Friday night in Party City—Roderick led us down the street to an unassuming green door, one of hundreds that line the streets of this storied neighborhood. We were still complaining, “How could anyone live here?” when he opened that door and showed us.
Just a few steps down a tree-lined walk and the frenzy of the Quarter evaporated. By the time we reached the pool, dating back to the 1870s, rumored to be the oldest swimming pool in the French Quarter, we were fully transported. “We have our own world in here,” smiled Roderick.
Our particular corner of the world, Cottage Three, the one that Elizabeth Taylor was fond of when she would stay here, was fronted with a massive private courtyard, basically a courtyard within a courtyard that let into a front sitting room and two deluxe bedrooms, shockingly quiet for being steps away from the tourist fray. I heard my daughter say something but wasn’t sure where she was; this place is that spacious. Bigger than I expect most French Quarter apartments are.
The cottages take their name from the fact that John James Audubon stayed in one for two months in the winter of 1821, before his more famous Louisiana residency at the Oakley House in the Felicianas. Mr. Audubon met the full spectrum of New Orleans’ charms upon arrival. Alexander Adams’ John James Audubon: A Biography has him carrying on at a party hosted by Felix Arnaud (no relation to Arnaud’s Restaurant, just around the corner from the hotel) then finding that his pocketbook had been stolen. To further his troubles, a portfolio of drawings had gone missing upriver in Natchez.
Mr. Audubon found work painting portraits for some of the city’s wealthy patrons, including a full body nude portrait of a woman for whom “the sight of her beauty so startled him that he dropped his chalk.” He took a room between two grocers. “[I]t was noisy, and he could hear everything going on in the stores as well his landlady’s quarters,” reports Adams. Audubon and the landlady agreed on five dollars for a half-month rent, and the naturalist had a place to live and work in the city.
We had undoubtedly a better night’s sleep than the famed naturalist, for we scarcely noticed Roderick and his team assembling our breakfast in our private courtyard. Over croissants and coffee, we awoke into a dream of pampering. We are not what you’d call hotel people, ones who coo over the flurrying attention of a staff. A hotel room is a hotel room to me, maybe with better sheets as the price goes up, and I never look forward to stumbling over each other all the way to vacation breakfast. Here was unadulterated luxury. Kevin, Roderick’s uniformed assistant, arrived with a pitcher just as I was thinking about orange juice.
A hallmark of how nice the Audubon Cottages are, is how with each sojourn into the midsummer heat of the Quarter, we were racing to get back to our sanctuary. It opened up a new reality of the familiar district to us. We made trips out to both the St. Louis Cathedral and the New Orleans Voodoo Museum, the full spiritual gamut within walking distance, and then darted back to the pool and the shocking peace of the courtyard the instant we got hot. This was living.
The toast of New Orleans dining is a stone’s throw from your door; from Antoine’s and Brennan’s around the corner to the new breed of high end dining with Susan Spicer’s Bayona across the street. We had a tough time choosing, so much so that we opted instead to take advantage of an afternoon breeze and get roast beef and french fry poboys from the Verti Marte deli a few blocks away. Roderick saw me walk in with the bag and remarked with consternation, “Oh, you should have let me get that delivered for you.”
The Audubon Cottages are both luxurious and private, but it’s Roderick that really takes the experience of staying there to the next level. Roderick Bernal was raised in the Philippines and got a degree in civil engineering—he offered up that detail while explaining why the place was so quiet, “I believe it is because of the layers of thick walls and how the cottages are arranged to absorb the sound.” He earned his hospitality stripes at the Ritz Carlton in the Cayman Islands. When he gives tours of the property, he exudes such a personal pride that one might mistake him for the owner.
“I want my guests to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he says from his desk in a corner of cottage four that served in ages past as the servants’ quarters. He was quick to pick up on my daughter’s new-found fascination with ghosts and took us through the two-story cottage adjacent to his office. The presence of two ghosts, a short woman with long white hair and a soldier humming country music, has been reported on the long balcony overlooking the cottages private courtyard. He neither confirms nor refutes the presence of spirits but admits to inspecting that very room once and then coming back in to find the plush down comforter folded over on one corner, with the no-smoking sign moved to the center of the exposed part of the bed. He arranges to have our things moved to Cottage Four to experience it for ourselves.
The only visitation we get that evening is Roderick with an ice bucket and a bottle of champagne. It’s a few hours after he’d already left for the evening but he thought it would be a nice touch. This place is like a full massage of nice touches. Each room has a boxed folio edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, and one cannot help but imagine him working away on those sketches in what is now Cottage One, just around the pool there. One wonders if his evening air was filled with the contrapuntal chirps of the Hyla gratiosa, or barking tree frog, in what is now our personal secluded courtyard. We can’t hear a peep of the contemporary counterparts to the quadroon balls and drinking parlors Adams’ biography has filling Mr. Audubon’s evenings in the area. Audubon got word that his lost portfolio had been found in Natchez, and soon made plans to escape the trying haze of New Orleans for the solitude of the Felicianas. For us, New Orleans and the rest of civilization's hurried masses were a world away from our private cottage oasis, and we were hard pressed to want to leave. Roderick seemed to take our departure the hardest, and made us promise to return. I can’t imagine where else I’d rather stay.
The Audubon Cottages
509 Dauphine Street
New Orleans, La.
(504) 586-1516
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