Gallier House

Built in 1861 by renowned architect James Gallier Jr. as his private residence, this Victorian townhouse featured innovations like indoor plumbing and hot running water. Anne Rice used it as the model for Louis and Lestat's residence in Interview with the Vampire.

The Gallier House at 1132 Royal Street in the French Quarter was designed and built by James Gallier Jr. as his personal family residence, completed in 1860. Gallier was one of the leading architects of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, the son of James Gallier Sr., an Irish-born architect who had Americanized his name from Gallagher to appeal to the city's French Creole population. The younger Gallier's portfolio included some of the city's most important buildings, among them the French Opera House and Christ Episcopal Church. For his own home on Royal Street, he incorporated engineering innovations that were remarkable for the era, including indoor plumbing with hot and cold running water and an ingenious double skylight system. The house was furnished with refined decorative arts guided by his and his wife's exacting taste. He had married Josephine Aglae Villavaso of St. Bernard Parish in 1853, and the couple had four daughters: Elizabeth Leonie, Josephine Blanche, Francoise Josephine, and Jeanne Clemence.

The comfortable life the Gallier family enjoyed depended on the labor of enslaved people and later domestic servants, whose stories are now interpreted alongside those of the family in museum tours. In 1868, just eight years after moving into the house he had designed, James Gallier Jr. died of yellow fever within its walls at the age of forty. He was buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 in a monument he had originally designed for his father, who had perished alongside his wife Catherine in a shipwreck off Savannah just two years earlier. The rapid succession of deaths across two generations gave the Gallier name a tragic dimension that went far beyond their architectural achievements. Josephine Gallier became a widow at a young age and would outlive her husband by nearly four decades, dying in 1906.

Some visitors and staff believe that James Gallier Jr. never fully left the house he poured his genius into creating. Claims persist that his ghost remains in the beautifully restored rooms, a presence felt most strongly during the museum's annual Creole Death and Mourning exhibition each October, when the house is staged to recreate nineteenth-century funeral customs. Visitors have reported unexplained cold spots in rooms, the sensation of being watched, and fleeting glimpses of a figure in period dress moving through the parlor rooms. The house served as author Anne Rice's model for the New Orleans residence of Louis and Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, a literary connection that has deepened the building's association with the supernatural. The Gallier House is now owned by Tulane University and operated as a museum alongside the Hermann-Grima House, open to the public for tours that explore the full spectrum of life and death in antebellum New Orleans.