There is a copper skillet in Kelly Hamilton’s Gentilly Terrace home that hangs by its handle 6½ feet up the kitchen wall.
The bottom half is black, as though dipped in tar, then hung to dry. The black line is a grim reminder of the height post-Hurricane Katrina floodwaters reached at her previous home one mile away on Rapides Drive.
“I wanted to be on higher ground,” Hamilton said, so in 2006, she and her husband, Mike Hamilton, bought a new home in Gentilly, where she was born. She’s a retired history instructor who taught at both Xavier University and the University of New Orleans (now LSU New Orleans), and she grew up in Slidell on Bayou Liberty.
The French knew where to build. Gentilly Terrace was founded as a European settlement on the natural levee along Bayou Sauvage soon after the French Quarter was established. The neighborhood, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was first developed as 18th-century French plantations on naturally higher ground. It was transformed into a streetcar suburb featuring raised California Craftsman bungalows like the one Kelly Hamilton now lives in.
Four pillars of natural Louisiana cypress support three arched openings in the Hamilton home. The natural wood throughout the house is an architectural focal point.
Photo by Eric Lincoln
The neighborhood’s Craftsman-style architecture gives it a distinctly West Coast aesthetic that’s rare in New Orleans but nevertheless has the state’s largest concentration of this home style.
While Gentilly sits on one of the city’s highest natural ridges (roughly 4 to 5 feet above sea level), developers actively terraced and graded the land to create hummocks, or small hills, and accentuate the “hilly” topography. Due to topography rendered uneven by modern tampering, some houses were entirely spared of Katrina floodwaters. The two-bay raised, Craftsman single house that the Hamiltons bought was one of them.
Built in 1925 on a lot set back 20 feet from the street — as is customary in the neighborhood — the raised California Craftsman bungalow is obscured by a Japanese maple tree set within a lawn of verdant St. Augustine grass. The walkway leading to the house is framed by masses of agapanthus, nandina, azaleas and walking iris bushes.
Like all the doors in the not-quite-1,300-square-foot house, the front door and all its hardware are original. The door and its sidelights are of paned glass set in flawless, natural Louisiana cypress, all topped by a fanned transom, also of natural cypress.
Between the living room, where you enter, and the dining room are tall pillars of natural cypress that Mike Hamilton, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran and a Terminix manager of many years, stripped down and refinished himself. But the rest of the home’s millwork is still in its original state after Mike Hamilton passed away last year. He and Kelly had been married for 37 years.
Kelly Hamilton in her Gentilly Terrace living room with Henry Butler, a Golden Retriever/Cocker Spaniel mix. She also shares her home with Senora Nora, Millicent Kitty, a tortoiseshell Calico cat.
Photo by Eric Lincoln
“Mike had excellent carpentry skills and a passion for woodworking,” Kelly Hamilton said. “He used them to restore this house, upon which a prior owner had inflicted some decisions that were not in keeping with its history.”
Soft colors throughout the home complement the stunning millwork without competing with it. The furnishings are a combination of comfortable finds, antiques, both acquired and inherited, and a collection of fine rugs from Turkey and Morocco.
Mike Hamilton built a bookcase in an alcove next to the dining room chimney, which rises above the central fireplace. It looks like it’s always been there, and it holds a collection of much-loved board games. Painstakingly refinished oak floors in a cherry hue run throughout most of the home.
“Mike peeled off three layers of old linoleum flooring to restore the original hardwood floors in the kitchen,” said Kelly Hamilton. “I hope others will be inclined to preserve these old Craftsman homes.”
Increasingly, the walls are covered with Kelly Hamilton’s own watercolor and acrylic paintings. They join other works by Freddie Guess, as well as those collected on the couple’s travels. They traveled many times to England, where Kelly Hamilton’s mother lived before she immigrated to New Orleans.
“We made our choices. I always drove an older car, and Mike relied on his work truck, so we could save money to travel. We started the tour company so we could see the world,” Kelly said of the original New Orleans Culinary History Tour, which the couple founded in 2004.
“We always cooked; I still do,” she said. “We were very interested in foodways and the way these things connect us. My mother never became a U.S. citizen, and I grew up eating Indian food one night and gumbo the next.”
Mike Hamilton installed all the Mexican Talavera tile in the kitchen. He used a plain terra cotta for the backsplash and a more ornate variety for the trim. He also installed the white-washed beadboard ceiling.
Photo by Eric Lincoln
Mike Hamilton put some mettle into the kitchen, creating the butcher-block island at the center of the room and tiling the walls with Mexican Talavera tile. A pair of picture windows overlooks a side garden from above the kitchen sink, affording a pleasant view while undertaking an otherwise mundane task.
Some of the tile work continues to the adjacent sunroom, also known as “the hunker down room. I can close off the rest of the house and hunker down back here and in the kitchen off a generator if there is a storm,” Kelly Hamilton said.
Both the kitchen and sunroom overlook a rear garden with a gracious swimming pool, which the couple added in 2008.
“That was another life choice,” she said. “I told Mike I would rather have a pool note than a car note.”