Reimaging the Grigson-Didier House: the Irish Channel's Oldest Home
Painting of the Grigson-Didier House (artist: Steve Mercer)
It can be humbling when a project with as much history as The Grigson-Didier House comes across your desk. The storied home has already been featured in the New York Times' T Magazine and national Antiques Magazine, not just for its own uniqueness but also for the love it has inspired in the eclectic and enthusiastic owners it has attracted.
A long history starting in 1835 saw the house evolve from the stately Creole plantation home of Mary Ann Grigson into a quirky complex serving as an apartment building in the late 1990s, up until antique dealer and preservation enthusiast Don Didier came into its possession. His efforts to gently advance the home into the 21st century set it back on a path towards its origins.
On the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the house again suffered greatly at the hands of Hurricane Ida when a mature water oak that Didier had been wary of during his ownership fell, impacting the roof framing and demolishing one of the dormers. A slower demolition that had been happening for years on the river-facing elevation became life-threatening for the structure as rotted siding and window sashes were shaken loose.
With the need to repair came the opportunity to reimagine the Grigson-Didier House under the house's current steward, hotelier Jayson Seidman. The house obviously needed repair from the damage of wind and moisture, but the various add-ons over the years had damaged more than that. The expression 'tout ensemble' is well-known in New Orleans preservation circles, meaning "total impression" or literally "all together", and taken all-together, the house had certainly lost the clarity of its history.
Photo by Christine Moe, 1976
Photo of home after Hurricane Ida, 2021
ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION
Preservation is the process of keeping something valued alive, or alternatively, something free from damage or decay. Keeping our valued buildings free from damage or decay is a non-creative technical act, one of clear sealants and proper flashing and tuckpointing brick.
Keeping our valued buildings alive is much more of an emotional act, and one that can be at odds with pure preservation.
To remain alive, buildings need to evolve with new owners, new technologies, sometimes new uses. Most importantly, to evolve requires change - the trick being to change just enough that the building maintains the continuity of its own story. The secret formula, rather than pure "preservation" lies in the National Park Service's standards for "rehabilitation", which has three goals: to IDENTIFY the pieces that help define the Historic Character, make decisions that RETAIN that those pieces and PRESERVE them for the future.
But, what if in identifying those pieces you identify a lot of other pieces that work against those goals? Often changes to buildings do just the opposite of what we seek to achieve - they OBSCURE defining pieces of Historic Character, they REMOVE their importance and contribute to DESTROYING them through poor detailing and construction.
Sometimes, being a good steward to history means removing historic building material - like an archaeologist removing the solidified dirt and mud around the valuable fossil.
OUR STRATEGY
We started by hiring Southkick Historic Preservation to help us do a deep dig on the home and its various forms and additions throughout its multi-century history. The main house and its accessory structures had fused together over the years, creating an odd jumble of indoor and outdoor spaces, and an even odder confluence of various roof structures that had conspired to do damage to the oldest structures, both by obscuring their original forms and by directing rainwater toward unforgiving corners and joists causing them to physically deteriorate.
Our strategy, which we worked with the Historic District Landmarks Commission to develop, became one of surgical removal, to extract from between the old Creole plantation home archetype and its equally aged kitchen out-structure a long metastasizing mish-mash of connective spaces that, while they contained important program of bathrooms and conditioned social space, they created issues that worked against the preservation of the most historically valuable and loved spaces.
As illustrated in this diagram by Southkick, the “hyphen” connecting the historic kitchen and historic main house, was built in the 1970s and deemed not historic.
Using the established practice of enclosing rear porches into service rooms known as "cabinets" we moved the bathroom and stair programs to the already altered rear porch bay. Then we reimagined the enclosed ground floor between the historic house and kitchen structure as an open glass box which would keep the important gathering space program while taking on a form that was more transparent, and shaped in a way that tried to get out of the way of the old shapes as much as we could. Improved roofing membranes and redirecting water away from the old structures and their foundations will further help the new addition do no harm in the future.
Time will tell where the future takes the old house, but we're sure the next chapter will see it remain a space to be enjoyed and valued, continuing to win allies in believing it to be something worth preserving.
rendering by Studio BKA