Hosting strangers since before it was a business.
The Granby family ran a boarding house here for thirty-four years. We kept the name, the floors, and the habit of feeding people.
Why a hostel, and why this house.
New Orleans has plenty of hotels with lobby art and valet stands. What it was missing was a place in the Marigny where a traveling trumpet player and a retired schoolteacher from Lyon could split a pot of coffee and a porch.
We found 2814 Dauphine in 2018: a 1907 single shotgun with sagging sills and the best bones on the block. Two years later the plaster medallions were back, the heart-pine floors were singing again, and the first bunk went in where Odile Granby once rented rooms to longshoremen.
One hundred nineteen years on Dauphine Street.
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The house goes up
A carpenter named Emile Granby builds a single shotgun with a camelback addition for his family of seven: twelve-foot ceilings, heart-pine throughout, a hallway straight from front door to kitchen.
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Rooms to let
Odile Granby, widowed, starts renting the front rooms to dockworkers and musicians. The house ledger, which we still have, records one tenant paying two weeks of rent in oysters.
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The quiet years
The boarding house era ends. The grandchildren keep the house in the family and rent it whole to schoolteachers and one very prolific watercolorist.
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Katrina
The house takes on three feet of water, loses its kitchen, and shelters eleven neighbors in the camelback for six weeks. The waterline mark stays, framed, in the hallway.
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We find it
Two former backpackers buy the house from the Granby family with a handshake promise to keep the name and the porch. Restoration takes two years.
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Granby House opens
The first guests check in: three Australians who stayed eleven nights and still send a card every Mardi Gras.
Small on purpose.
Twenty-two beds. That is the whole house and the whole plan. The staff learns your name by the second coffee, the kitchen never has more than one person waiting for a burner, and quiet hours work because everyone at breakfast agreed to them.
- We hire locally and pay above the city’s hospitality median
- Schedules go up three weeks ahead
- The house closes one week each September, paid, before festival season
Come add a page to the ledger.
The house has been collecting stories since 1907. Yours fits right in.
Book a bed