New Orleans New Elegance

Award-winning photographer Kerri McCaffety looks at the city's most innovative and iconic interiors in a quest to define the essence of New Orleans's unique style. What makes New Orleans different from everywhere else? The answer is its history: three centuries of complex cultural influences-French, Spanish, and African-converging in a unique climate and a strategic location at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Today New Orleans style is moving forward while still embracing the extravagance of the past. The grandeur of the Greek revival architecture and the drama of the live oaks are tempered by a fresh, more relaxed elegance that respects classical proportions and details but introduces a more contemporary vocabulary in furnishings and accessories.

Kerri McCaffety is an accomplished interiors photographer who has been hailed as "the reigning Queen of New Orleans photography." Her work has been featured in prestigious publications including Metropolitan Home, House Beautiful, Southern Accents, Travel & Leisure, and Town and Country. A contributor to nearly a dozen books, McCaffety is the principal photographer for Bryan Batt's Big Easy Style (Potter 2011) and Thomas Jayne's Finest Rooms in America (Monacelli 2010).

As a contributing editor, Julia Reed provides a Southern perspective to social topics at Newsweek, Vogue, Elle Decor, and The New York Times.