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"View Slideshow\n\nOn the whole, the grand old houses of New Orleans tend to be stuffed with antiques and festooned with the dangling crystal prisms of Victorian chandeliers. Locals have powerful ties to their familial pasts, and their devotion to the city's history is as fervent as ever\u2014heirlooms and Oriental rugs remain far more plentiful in the Big Easy than contemporary art and midcentury chairs. That's not the case, however, in a certain circa-1829 home in the Faubourg Marigny area. While its crumbling pink stucco fa\u00E7ade has a romantic patina, the mood inside is startlingly mod, with a black-and-white palette highlighting the building's flawless Greek Revival bone structure.\n\nThis spic-and-span aesthetic makes perfect sense for owner Sidney D. Torres IV. A dashing real-estate developer and venture capitalist who grew up in nearby St. Bernard Parish, he founded and directs the four-property French Quarter Hotel Group. (His latest undertaking is the Cove Eleuthera, a resort in the Bahamas that reopens next month after a major renovation.) But it was his trash-collecting and street-cleaning operation, SDT Waste &amp;amp; Debris Services, launched shortly after Hurricane Katrina, that made him a hometown celebrity. The firm's black-and-silver trucks, matching uniforms, and fun, glam TV commercials starring Torres's friends Kid Rock and Lenny Kravitz captured the city's attention\u2014 and the entrepreneur's high-profile service to the community earned him a clutch of civic awards.\n\nTorres sold the business about a year ago, in a deal he put together in his dining room, at a sleek custom-made table topped with polished black granite. \"I use it as often for business meetings as I do for meals,\" he says of the lofty space, which is animated by a giant keyhole-shaped mirror in the surrealist manner of midcentury French designer Serge Roche.\n\nThat glittering mirror was one of the many treasures hunted down by Lee Ledbetter, the New Orleans architect and interior designer who renovated the faded landmark. Like Robert A.M. Stern, for whom he once worked, he is both talented and scholarly. But Ledbetter's projects\u2014Torres's hip hotels among them\u2014most often take a modernist turn, even when, as in this case, the building is historic. In fact, the three-story dwelling was previously one of his client's hotels, the Rivers Inn. After the hurricane some of Torres's properties were struggling for survival, so he turned the place into his personal residence.\n\nLedbetter expanded many of the three-foot-wide doorways between rooms to 12 feet. \"I've renovated four large French Quarter houses, and I've done this in every one,\" the architect says. \"It helps open up the spaces, create flow, increase views, and bring in light. But I also respect what's there.\" For instance, existing moldings were expertly replicated to preserve the rooms' historic integrity. Torres was involved in every design decision, from choosing appliances for the streamlined kitchen to picking out marble for the five luxurious baths. \"I had to run all the whites by him,\" Ledbetter says with a grin.\n\nClassic 20th-century furnishings\u2014never the obvious ones, more Osvaldo Borsani than Charles and Ray Eames\u2014define the interiors, along with a scattering of antiques. The architect also mixed in contemporary art, namely striking modern works by admired Louisiana artist George Dunbar, a client and longtime friend. Every sofa is a Ledbetter creation, including the living room's 13-foot sectional, which he covered in a silk velvet whose color wavers intriguingly between gunmetal and bronze.\n\nThe introduction of that elusive shade took a bit of lobbying, since Torres will countenance only black and white. \"I like the way that combination defines architecture,\" the hotelier says. \"This place is all about high ceilings, thick crown moldings, and wide-board pine floors.\" Nonetheless, Ledbetter smuggled in shades of brown, bronze, and gray and glints of gold to relieve the severity of the palette. For the floors, a stain was custom mixed\u201470 percent ebony, 30 percent coffee-brown\u2014and topped off with three coats of high-gloss polyurethane for a patent-leather luster. \"Near-black is much more interesting than jet-black,\" the architect insists. \"It's got so much more depth.\"\n\nLedbetter decorated the three-room master suite, a space flooded with sunlight from triple-hung windows, all in white with ethereal gold accents. Was he trying to dial up some serious Hollywood glamour, maybe making a reference to Jean Harlow's snowy bedroom in the movie Dinner at Eight? Not intentionally, Ledbetter says; the all-white scheme was chosen mainly because it makes the room feel \"up in the clouds.\" That heavenly sensation is underscored by vast white shag rugs \"so thick you want to roll around on them,\" says Torres's fianc\u00E9e, Jennifer Savoie, who met him after the house was finished.\n\nThe two hit it off the moment they were introduced\u2014by Torres's mother, no less, who bumped into the young woman at a hair salon. Now the couple is working together on the Bahamas resort project. \"It will be white, white, white,\" Savoie says. \"We'll bring color in through pillows and art, but no black.\" And once that job is done, there's one more improvement left to make at the house in New Orleans: Ledbetter says he will be building the future Mrs. Torres one fantastic closet.\n\nClick here to see the slide show of this Lee Ledbetter-decorated historic New Orleans home."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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