Maison Vireo, New Orleans

We arrived on lower Chartres in the blue hour, when the gas lamps come up and the Quarter exhales, and stepped through a carriageway into a courtyard that stopped us where we stood. Banana leaves and ferns climbed three storeys of weathered brick, a tiered fountain trickled, and somewhere jasmine was opening for the night. Maison Vireo is a faithfully restored Creole townhouse, all wrought-iron galleries and slatted cypress shutters, set in the calmer downriver end of the French Quarter where residents outnumber revellers. The city's particular magic, the decay and the lushness braided together, is concentrated in that single green well of a courtyard.

The room

Our room opened onto the second-floor gallery, its French doors giving straight onto the iron lacework and the courtyard below. Inside, the proportions were tall and cool, plaster walls the colour of café au lait, a mahogany four-poster, a slow ceiling fan turning over the bed. The restoration was tactful: original heart-cypress floors, a marble mantel, a gallery key on a brass fob. Modern comforts were slipped in without fuss, a deep walk-in shower behind subway tile, good linen, a turntable with a small stack of local jazz. We left the doors open all night and let the fountain and the distant brass be the soundtrack.

The whole hotel is really an excuse to live in that courtyard, and what a thing to be persuaded of.The Suite Edit

Service & food

Service has the easy New Orleans warmth, unhurried, funny, generous with a tip about where the locals actually eat. Breakfast is a small, perfect thing taken in the courtyard: chicory coffee, warm beignets dusted at the table, a bowl of grits if you want one. But the soul of the place is the nine-stool bar off the carriageway, where a bartender with encyclopaedic knowledge of Louisiana rye and Caribbean rum builds a Sazerac the proper way and a Ramos gin fizz he shakes for an honest twelve minutes. There is no kitchen for dinner, but Frenchmen Street and the Quarter's best rooms are minutes on foot.

The verdict

Maison Vireo is for the traveller who loves New Orleans for its texture rather than its hangovers, the design lover, the cocktail pilgrim, the couple after a courtyard to themselves. It rewards anyone happy to make the bar and the fountain their evening. The honest caveat is simple geography: this is still the French Quarter, and even on a residential block the sound of a passing brass band, a late reveller or the Sunday-morning street sweeper carries on the humid air. Pack the earplugs, request a courtyard-facing room, and the city becomes atmosphere rather than intrusion.