The Chloe, Uptown mansion turned hotel, opens with ‘21st century New Orleans hospitality’ (2024)

Only St. Charles Avenue could make a mansion like the one known now asThe Chloe seem to subtly blend in.

With its elaborate façade veiled by gray/green oak limbs, it stands back along a stretch of Uptown thick with similarly grand homes, where the streetcars clatter, Mardi Gras beads truss the power lines and another major institution or old neighborhood standby waits around every bend.

Now though, this lushly revamped 19th century property is stepping forward as the centerpiece of a bold undertaking. Its Uptown setting is the key.

The Chloe is a 14-room hotel with a restaurant, bar and pool patio. Together, they make a pitch as much to locals who want to sink deep into their own city as to visitors out to explore a new one.

The Chloe opened early in October. Long in the works, it debuts as the pandemic has simultaneously plunged restaurants and hotels into the hardest times these entwined sectors have known in generations.

What gives proprietor Róbert LeBlanc confidence in The Chloe’s prospects is how, from the start, it was devised to tack differently from conventional restaurants or hotels.

The Chloe was conceived to mesh with Uptown neighborhood life, and that dynamic has remained buoyant.

“There’s so much rich New Orleans culture around us here," LeBlanc said. "We wanted to give people a sense of that, a terroir of what Uptown New Orleans is about and how people who live here experience it.”

Sense of place and style

The Chloe is the latest from LeBlanc + Smith, the local company behind the restaurants Sylvain, Meauxbar, Cavan and Longway Tavern and the bar Barrel Proof.

These spots share an evocative aesthetic, each weaving modern style into an old framework. They give a timeless New Orleans sense of place, but also a sense of how the next generation applies its own tastes and influences, reading like new chapters added to long narratives.

“We think it’s important to honor the heritage of this city while at the same time doing our part to define what 21st century New Orleans hospitality should be,” LeBlanc said.

The Chloe layers this idea with the amenities of a hotel, presenting a place people might stay for the weekend, for an afternoon at the pool (patio chairs will soon be available for reservation) or for a drink on the porch between other stops on their day.

It has the feel of a club, a historic house, a contemporary art gallery and a modern New Orleans restaurant all cohabitating behind its garden gates and under its rambling roof line.

“We wanted to give people different access points, different ways that they can interact with this place and different reasons to come through the door,” said LeBlanc.

The hotel functions a bit differently behind the scenes too. To reopen its restaurants in the pandemic, LeBlanc + Smith devised a new operating plan that focuses on smaller staff with cross-training and shared roles, as well as salaried pay and benefits for all. The Chloe also uses that template.

Telling the story

In size and scope, The Chloe is the company’s most ambitious project to date. But by hotel standards, it’s tiny. It was never going to court the convention business.

Its closest local comparison is the Columns Hotel, built in another historic mansion nearby on St. Charles Avenue. Both the Columns Hotel and The Chloe were originally designed as private homes by the same architect, Thomas Sully, a prominent name in 19th century New Orleans.

At The Chloe, most guest rooms are on the upper two floors of the old house. The bar occupies a one-time parlor.

The kitchen is in an outbuilding, just behind the main house. The restaurant it serves is worked throughout many different public spaces.

Chef Todd Pulsinelli and his crew bring dishes to people seated in a bright main dining room, out on the garden terrace or the back patio and in small niches around the house.

Pulsinelli made his name in contemporary New Orleans cuisine at Restaurant August, where he was executive chef for six years before opening Warbucks, which later closed.

His opening menu for The Chloe is a mix of casual, anytime plates — baked oysters, seafood salad, shrimp rolls, double stack burgers and a chicken katsu sandwich — and more substantial dishes — hanger steak with bordelaise, snapper with BBQ shrimp, butter-crusted blackened drum. The shrimp étouffée dumplings, served all day, are an evolution of a dish Pulsinelli had on his tasting menus back at August.

The Chloe’s home dates to 1891. From a private residence, it became a boarding house and, later, a bed-and-breakfast.

To recast it as The Chloe, designer Sara Ruffin Costello created an interior that feels like the set for a script waiting to be written.

What could have been a cast-off space behind a fireplace now forms an L-shaped chamber, set with tables, like the first turn in a labyrinth. Across the house, two small private dining rooms connect through a horseshoe-shaped passage.

Every Victorian intricacy of its exterior corresponds with some interesting and clever space within, especially the cupolas and dormers for the upper rooms. Some of the details are so delightful it would be a shame to spoil the surprise of their reveal.

It still feels much more like a home than a venue, all freshly done now for its debut but showing vestiges of a long life.

“What we want to show people is the modern expression of an old-school inn,” LeBlanc said. “There’s a lot happening Uptown, in the culture, the architecture, the history, the food. With a hotel, we have a great lens to help tell the story.”

The Chloe

4125 St. Charles Ave., (504) 315-2159

Restaurant open daily from 11:30 a.m.; hotel bookings begin later in October