Windsor Court Hotel

Gravier Street, a few blocks back from the Mississippi in the business district of New Orleans, is an unlikely place for an English country house. In 1984, the year the Louisiana World Exposition brought crowds to the riverfront, the local businessman James J. Coleman Jr. opened the Windsor Court Hotel there: a modern tower on the outside, and inside something closer to a London club, with paintings, antiques and a tea room.

History

Coleman wanted a hotel that would stand apart from the large convention properties then rising downtown. He named it after Windsor and gave it an English character down to the art on its walls. Where most new hotels of the 1980s were built for volume, the Windsor Court was planned around suites, and most of its rooms are still suites. The hotel opened in the same year as the world's fair, which brought visitors to the warehouses and wharves a few blocks away and left behind much of the riverfront the city uses now. It has changed hands since Coleman's time and has been renovated more than once, but the original formula of English art, large rooms and attentive service has stayed in place.

Architecture and design

The building is set back from Gravier Street behind a courtyard with a fountain, where cars pull in off the street. The architecture is plain on the outside, and the character is all inside. The public rooms and corridors hold a collection of art from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, much of it British: portraits, landscapes, sporting pictures and decorative pieces, set alongside antique furniture. The collection was assembled for the opening and gives the hotel the feel of a private house that has been collecting for generations.

Rooms and suites

Most rooms are suites, many with separate sitting rooms, and some have balconies or bay windows looking over the river or the city. The decoration follows the English theme, with traditional furniture, muted fabrics and marble bathrooms. From the upper floors the views run along the great bend of the Mississippi that gives New Orleans its nickname, the Crescent City.

Dining

Afternoon tea in Le Salon, the lounge off the lobby, is the hotel's best-known ritual, served with sandwiches, scones and pastries and accompanied by live music. The Grill Room is the main restaurant. The Polo Club Lounge, panelled and hung with equestrian paintings, serves cocktails in the manner of a gentlemen's club, and it fills at the end of the working day with people from the offices around it.

Wellness

There is a spa with treatment rooms, a fitness centre and an outdoor pool on a terrace above the street.

Weddings and events

The Windsor Court hosts weddings, receptions and private dinners in its event rooms, and its size suits board meetings and smaller corporate events rather than large conventions.

Location

The hotel stands in the Central Business District, between Canal Street and the Warehouse District, a few blocks from the river. The ferry to Algiers leaves from the foot of Canal Street, the convention centre lies upriver along the waterfront, and the French Quarter begins on the far side of Canal. The Canal Street streetcar runs close by. Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport is about half an hour away by car. The Warehouse District, with its galleries and the museums around Lee Circle, lies just to the south. As a luxury hotel in New Orleans, it offers the calm of a residential building in the middle of the business district, and a cup of tea at four o'clock.