From the archive: Nicky Haslam conjures up 18th-century grandeur in the old quarter of New Orleans (2000)

In 1682, a French fur trader from the North American frontier sailed the length of the Mississippi to its delta. There he erected a commemorative column and claimed, 'in the name of the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince Louis the Great, the vast wilderness he had traversed. Thus Louis XIV, far away in his glittering palaces, gave his name to the Louisiana Territory, three times the size of his own country. This untamed and far flung region, and its eventual major city, New Orleans, would be successively French, Spanish and briefly French again, until in 1803 it was sold to a fledgling United States of America.

That proud column no doubt sank into the swamps on which New Orleans was so ingeniously built, but the Bourbon dynasty is indelibly stamped on the city. The rues Royale, Dauphine, St Antoine, St Louis, Chartres and Bourbon define the French Quarter, or vieux carré, which even has its own Elysian Fields, a boulevard as wide as its Parisian namesake, whizzing grandly off towards Texas.

Distinct from the mint-julep, southern-belle gentility of cities such as Natchez and Monroe, and the Anglophile aristocracy of Charleston and Atlanta, New Orleans was a potpourri of European nationalities – French, Spanish, German, Italian and Slav, as well as the enslaved Africans and the watchful Native Americans. For all its fabled atmosphere of laissez-faire, it was a city built on commerce, chiefly cotton - diamond hard beneath the magnolia skin, knife-sharp under the languor. New Orleans looked to Europe, rather than the States, for its culture - the surest proof of which is the vast, Parisian- style hôtel-particulier of Madame de Pontalba, eighteenth-century New Orleans's richest heiress.

Thus the grid of the French Quarter teemed with tapissiers, ébénistes, herreros, Porzellanhersteller, kozhevnik, sklárskatvorba, painters of trompe l'oeil and architects. Many of these former ateliers have since declined; in the heart of the Quarter, how ever, they have become residential, with wide verandas shading luscious courtyards. One such courtyard, on Chartres Street, lies behind the balconied façade of The Soniat House, the French Quarter's most distinguished and tranquil hotel.

Rodney and Frances Smith, whose 1860s mansion in the Garden District I helped decorate some fifteen years ago, moved into the house next door to the hotel and once more asked me to redesign, specifying only that the main space on the ground floor was to be the showroom for the stylish antique furniture and objects Rodney and Frances buy on their trips to Europe; otherwise the house could be rearranged to have a grander staircase hall and fewer, better-proportioned rooms.

With the help of brilliant young architect Frank Masson, the enlarged spaces were established: once higher ceilings were conjured out of thin air and huge bathrooms and dressing rooms coaxed from seemingly minute nooks, we started planning the interior design. The eighteenth century was our watchword - not too strict or raffiné, but newer, given élan, glamour, drama.

The nationalities of those bygone craftsmen seemed a perfect source to draw on. From the Schloss Phauneninsel, outside Berlin, came the idea of gilded and painted chinoiserie style wallpaper for the salon, where the columned recesses were filled with three-and-a-half-metre high verre églomisé panels by the talented, Czech-born Nominka d'Albanella. From Italian palazzi came the stone-white staircase hall with scarlet curtains, while French ironwork inspired the blue-black balustrade. Russia was represented in the small, book-lined dining room, its ceiling painted with clouds and its narrow columns based on those taken from the tsar's bedroom at the Catherine Palace; tiles for the bathroom came from the St Petersburg factory used by Peter the Great. From Sweden came the idea of cool, reversed, hand-printed cotton for the walls of the main bedroom. The decoration of Capo di Monte's Wood-grain service - scaled-up-was the inspiration for the walls of the lift, and tough English trelliswork lines the entrance-hall walls.