A New Orleans Double Shotgun on Chestnut Street

160 years of history layered into one home

A few months ago, an old friend commissioned a drawing of an historic New Orleans home. It was a gift from one brother to another.

What drew me to this commission was the history behind the house.

Not just the architecture, though the structure itself is classic and striking. But the fact that this home has quietly carried nearly 160 years of stories within its walls. From changing owners, evolving uses, generations passing through, and the city itself shifting around it.

Chestnut Street, Quintessential New Orleans

An 1844 plot map of the area of Chestnut Street.

The house sits on Chestnut Street in New Orleans, a block from Commander’s Palace. The owner told me that on certain evenings, they can open the back door and actually smell the cooking drifting through the neighborhood. It feels like one of those details that could only belong to New Orleans.

The home is what’s known as a “double shotgun” house — a style deeply tied to the city’s history and neighborhoods. Shotgun houses are long, narrow homes with rooms lined up one behind another, originally designed to help move air through the heat before air conditioning existed.

The two doors of the Double Shotgun on Chestnut.

A double shotgun is essentially two shotgun homes joined side-by-side beneath one roofline, creating a mirrored layout. Double Shotgun homes became common throughout New Orleans in the nineteenth century and still give many neighborhoods their rhythm and character today.

A stroll along Chestnut Street is a front row seat to southern architecture at its finest.

A Piece of New Orleans History — Plus a Murder Mystery

This particular house was built around 1865 by a free woman of color, during a period when New Orleans had a large and influential community of “gens de couleur libres” — free people of color who owned property, operated businesses, and helped shape the city, and its culture, long before Reconstruction.

The property itself traces back even earlier to women like Lucille Vivant Lioteau and Manette Bacchus, both connected to prominent Creole families with deep roots in New Orleans history. For many people, the Garden District tells one story about the city. Places like this tell another.

An antebellum porch on Chestnut Street

Architecturally, the house still carries details from the antebellum era: boxed columns, tall floor-length windows, transoms above the doors, dentil molding, soaring ceilings, and old pocket doors inside.

At one point, the home had been divided into several apartments. Somewhere along the way, there was even a murder tied to the property — one of those stories that survives in fragments and neighborhood memory.

Capturing the Final Image on Paper

Maybe history is what make homes like this Double Shotgun so compelling to draw.

Not simply because they’re beautiful, but because they’ve endured. They hold layers. Family

The final sketch: 2823 Chestnut Street

stories, city history, ordinary life, difficult moments, reinvention. Over time, all of it settles into the structure itself.

When I tackled this one, I tried to capture the layers of history within the architecture but also within the framework of the city of New Orleans bringing in the cobblestones and majestic trees that shape Chestnut Street.

That’s often what these commissions become about for me. Paying attention to places that mean something to the people connected to them.

Every place holds a story worth remembering.

Scott

P.S. If there's a meaningful place you'd like captured in a custom sketch, you can start a commission inquiry here.