Skip the French Quarter crowds for this eight-acre estate in New Orleans’ Lakewood area: Officials say

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A Quiet Escape Just Past the Quarter
You turn off Bamboo Road and follow a short, winding drive lined with pine trees, and the mood shifts almost right away. City noise falls behind you, and what’s left feels closer to a European country estate than a New Orleans neighborhood. This eight-acre property in the Lakewood area carries National Historic Landmark status, and parking is included with your visit, so you can walk straight in. Locals talk about it as a calm break from the French Quarter crowds, but the house at the end of that drive has a story of its own. Shutterstock
Moving a House One Log at a Time
Edith Rosenwald Stern and Edgar Bloom Stern built this estate, and the Classical Revival mansion you walk through today is not the original. The first house on the property got moved about 100 yards, a little each day, by a crew of donkeys pulling it across logs. The Sterns had it done after a trip through Europe left them wanting a home that matched the gardens they were planning. Landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman ended up shaping both, so the interiors and the grounds outside speak to each other in a way most estates never manage. Wikimedia Commons/Joseph Guccione
One House, Four Different Front Doors
Architects William and Geoffrey Platt gave the mansion four separate facades, and each one works as its own entrance and exit. You can walk out the west side and land at the Oak Allée, framed by a symmetrical Palladian front. Head out the south side instead, and you’re standing over the Spanish Court, styled after the French Quarter’s Beauregard-Keyes House. The east face pulls from Shadows-on-the-Teche, a historic home 130 miles away in New Iberia. Four sides, four different countries and eras, all in one building. Wikimedia Commons/Gottscho-Schleisner Collection
Walk Through Rooms Built for Entertaining
Guided tours run daily and last about 45 minutes, enough time to take in rooms packed with English and American antiques, carpets, and period furnishings. You’ll pass through the Drawing Room, the Library, and the Ladies Reception Room, each one dressed for a different kind of gathering. This house had central air conditioning when it was built, a rare feature for the region at the time. Below grade, a basement held a wine cellar, a photography darkroom, and a clock system that ran through the entire house. Wikimedia Commons/Gottscho-Schleisner Collection
Picasso and Kandinsky Hang Inside
Edith Stern started collecting modern art in the early 1960s, and her first purchase, a Wassily Kandinsky painting, still hangs in the Blue Room. From there, the collection grew to include work by Pablo Picasso and Victor Vasarely, leaning toward the bold, geometric style of Op and Kinetic art that defined the era. In 1964, an open-air porch got converted into a dedicated Modern Art Gallery to hold it all.

You walk from 1940s antiques into 1960s abstraction in the space of a hallway, and the contrast is part of the point. Wikimedia Commons/Infrogmation of New Orleans
Each Garden Room Has Its Own Mood
Outside, eight acres make up what’s considered Ellen Biddle Shipman’s mature masterpiece. She split the grounds into what she called garden rooms, open-air chambers that each carry a different feel as you move through them. Sightlines get careful attention here, so your eye keeps getting pulled toward the next view, and every window in the house lines up with a garden below it. Longue Vue is the only property left where both Shipman’s interiors and her landscape survive intact and open for you to walk through. Wikimedia Commons/Longue Vue House and Gardens
Fountains Dance in the Spanish Court
The Spanish Court draws its design from the Generalife garden at the Alhambra in Spain, and it’s built to be the centerpiece of the whole property. Rows of fountains send jets of water up in patterns people describe as dancing, and trimmed green hedges form the kind of knot-work you’d expect from an old European garden. A sculpture by local artist Lin Emery sits inside the court, adding a modern touch to a space that otherwise feels pulled straight from centuries ago. Wikimedia Commons/Infrogmation of New Orleans
A Wild Garden Full of Louisiana Irises
Not every part of the property is manicured. The one-acre Wild Garden came out of a collaboration between Shipman and naturalist Caroline Dormon, and it holds a notable stretch of native Louisiana irises. Shipman designed the brick dovecote that still stands here, and this patch counts as one of the few surviving examples of her wild garden work anywhere. Next to the formal garden rooms, it reads like a woodland counterpoint, looser and less structured, but planned just as carefully. Wikimedia Commons/Navin75
Something Blooms Here Every Season
The plant collection gets tended as a preservation garden, so color shows up no matter when you visit. Spring brings azaleas, camellias, Louisiana irises, and wisteria into bloom. By summer, hydrangea, magnolia, gardenia, and zinnia take over the beds. Fall and winter carry chrysanthemums, more camellias, and sasanqua through the colder months. You could visit in January and still find something in flower, which is part of why people come back more than once. Wikimedia Commons/Gottscho-Schleisner Collection
Kids Get Their Own Garden Maze
The Discovery Garden gives younger visitors a space built for them, with a garden maze and hands-on landscape art to dig into. On the first Sunday of every month, Louisiana residents get free admission to the gardens through the Free Family Sundays program. Storytime sessions, craft activities, and seasonal workshops run throughout the year, so there’s usually something scheduled beyond just walking the grounds.

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The post Skip the French Quarter crowds for this eight-acre estate in New Orleans’ Lakewood area appeared first on When In Your State.

It’s the kind of outing that works equally well for grandparents and grandchildren, without either side getting bored. Wikimedia Commons/Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. Live Music Fills the Gardens at Twilight
Twilight at Longue Vue brings local musicians into the gardens on select evenings, turning the grounds into a concert space after hours. Rotating art exhibits show up in the Playhouse and elsewhere on the property throughout the year. If you’d rather get hands-on, garden workshops cover flower arranging and nature-inspired crafts, and wellness classes bring yoga sessions and guided garden walks into the mix. Behind-the-scenes tours round things out for visitors who want a deeper look at how the estate actually runs. Wikimedia Commons/Infrogmation of New Orleans
The Gardens Are Recovering and Open
An EF1 tornado spun off Tropical Storm Arthur moved through the property on June 18, 2026. The main house came through without structural damage, but the gardens took the hardest hit. Today the grounds are fully open, with daily house tours, the cafe, and the museum store all running as usual. The Wild Garden is still working its way back, with replanting set for October through December and restoration expected to be mostly finished by early 2027. If you visit soon, you might catch new plantings still filling in, part of an estate that’s been cared for through worse. Wikimedia Commons/Infrogmation of New Orleans
Visiting Longue Vue House and Gardens
You’ll find Longue Vue at 7 Bamboo Road in the Lakewood area of New Orleans, La., close to City Park. The gardens open daily, running from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with house tours offered at set times throughout the day. Check the official website before you go for current tour times and ticket prices. The New Orleans Museum of Art, its Besthoff Sculpture Garden, and Bayou St. John all sit a short drive away, so you can pair a City Park visit with your stop here for a full afternoon away from the Quarter. This article was created with AI assistance and human editing. Read more from this brand:

Walk every block of New Orleans’ Garden District in an afternoon and feel 200 years pass

Inside this Louisiana plantation house, Thomas Jefferson’s signature still waits

How Tropical Storm Bertha moved across the Gulf

The post Skip the French Quarter crowds for this eight-acre estate in New Orleans’ Lakewood area appeared first on When In Your State.