The Bywater sits downriver from the French Quarter, separated from it by the Marigny and a handful of blocks that feel like a different city entirely. The streets are quieter, the houses are painted in colors that shouldn’t work but do, and the tourists largely haven’t found it yet. For anyone who wants to sleep inside New Orleans history rather than adjacent to it, this is the neighborhood.
Creole cottages are the defining architecture of the area, low-slung single-story structures with steeply pitched rooflines, wide front galleries, and interior layouts that open room to room without hallways. Most were built between the 1820s and 1860s by free people of color and working-class Creole families who built densely and well. The ones that survived did so because the bones were solid: old-growth cypress framing, hand-laid brick, thick plaster walls that keep the heat out better than most modern construction manages.
Greatmen Cottage on Dauphine Street is one of the better-documented examples available as a vacation rental. Built in 1838 and sitting inside the Bywater National Historic District, the building has been carefully restored by its owner, who won the Beersheba Award for Historic Preservation and has been featured in House Beautiful and Martha Stewart Living for the work. The property offers 11 to 12-foot ceilings, massive original windows, private outdoor terrace space with a garden, and interiors that mix period detail with functional updates. The structure itself is the experience: the proportions, the light through the tall shuttered windows, the quality of the old wood underfoot…