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"View Slideshow\n\nMr. and Mrs. Smith are major stars in New Orleans, as everyone there knows. No, not Brad and Angelina. Although that celebrity couple loves the Big Easy and has personally done a lot for the city. We actually mean Frances and Rodney Smith, owners of the French Quarter's small, perfect, prizewinning Soniat House Hotel, which for three decades has been the place to stay for visiting musicians, actors, politicians, and the generally stylish.\n\nThe Soniat family laid the groundwork for this phenomenon way back in the early 1830s, when they constructed three townhouses on Chartres Street for their burgeoning clan. The Smiths, both Louisiana natives (she was raised in New Orleans, while his family lived outside the city), came along in 1982 and bought two of the historic properties, acquiring the third around 1996. Refurbishing the buildings as a now-31-room boutique hotel, the couple succeeded in modernizing them while preserving their rich character. The duo also added a much-admired antiques shop to the premises that is its own destination.\n\n\"I imagined a warm hotel, with chic and elegant guests, and I'd be sitting in one of the gardens reading Faulkner,\" Rodney says, laughing at himself. \"But I never even got to garden. All I did was work to make the place perfect. The hard work got me interested in antiques and collecting. The Soniat had\u2014and still has\u2014a unique atmosphere, with glamorous courtyards and all the trimmings that made it special.\"\n\nBoth Frances and Rodney Smith grew up immersed in New Orleans lore, as well as in its music, food, and great traditions, especially Mardi Gras, with the kings and queens and marching bands and splendid costumes. While they travel frequently and have a beautiful pied-\u00E0-terre in Paris, the Smiths are devoted New Orleanians. They've owned five different homes in the city, and three have been decorated by their ebullient man-about-the-world friend of 30 years, London designer Nicky Haslam.\n\nThe latest, which is smaller than the Smiths' previous houses, is conveniently just steps from the Soniat. With only one bedroom, plus gracious entertaining spaces and a pretty garden terrace, the two-story residence is manageably petite. Before the couple moved in, they reached out to Haslam to enlist his services once again. \"They said, \u2018We think you'd better come decorate another house for us,'\" the designer recounts. \"\u2018One with just a hint of the past and still a modern feeling.'\"\n\nHaslam, who claims that even the thought of visiting New Orleans thrills him, didn't hesitate. \"Let's make it five!\" he jokes, adding, \"They love changing houses, and they have incredible taste.\" Haslam's own taste (which he describes as \"cosmopolitan\") has been shaped over the course of a fascinating career that spans the sex-drugs-rock-and-roll days, the big-money Wall Street era, and the Internet revolution. Haslam has kept up with it all, projecting a joie de vivre that has endeared him to everyone from the Rolling Stones to Madonna, from Truman Capote to Charles Saatchi, from the Duchess of Windsor to Princess Diana. Always tabbed for best-dressed lists, he has edited and written and photographed for magazines and is a sometime cabaret singer, too. He is apt to pepper his own digs with audacious fakes and unconventional artworks. But his encyclopedic knowledge of antiques and art and his innate sense of propriety usually lead to safer ground with clients.\n\nFor the Smiths' new home, the designer says the idea was to \"go with the flow of what we found\u2014wherever that led us. Of course, we had the greatest French and other pieces to select from at their Soniat Antiques gallery, which is a treasure trove.\"\n\nIn the end, the furnishings are a mix of French and Italian antiques interspersed with Haslam's own designs, a smattering of modern items, and sophisticated curiosities. Case in point: the dining room, where a classic 18th-century French crystal chandelier dangles above a table that comfortably accommodates a set of ten 20th-century chairs sourced from a restaurant in the South of France. At one end of the room, a richly ornamented papier-m\u00E2ch\u00E9 mirror is flanked by a pair of antique painted-cloth columns (all originally stage props) topped by fish-scale-pattern metal orbs from India, while another wall is fronted by an Italian painted armoire surmounted by a plaster bust from a local secondhand shop. Haslam ringed the entire space with a carved-and-painted trellis-motif dado\u2014a detail that continues, in trompe l'oeil, in the adjacent hallway, which British painters Chris and Paul Czainski embellished with a garden scene inspired by Rodney's favorite mural at the famous Villa of Livia in Rome. It's one of the fanciful touches Haslam employed throughout the residence. \"Unlike a lot of New Orleans, the house is not overly Frenchified,\" the designer says. \"It is smaller, fresher, and more youthful.\"\n\nThough the Smiths entertain often and occasionally open the dining room to hotel guests for intimate receptions, the home is meant to be their sanctuary. \"I know they are grandparents with a warm sense of family,\" says Haslam, \"but this is very much their own place. It's a perfect hideaway.\"\n\nStep inside the stunning antiques-filled New Orleans townhouse."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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