Longue Vue House and Gardens
A carefully integrated house and series of garden rooms reveal twentieth-century design, philanthropy, domestic labor, and New Orleans horticulture.
Artwork inspired by Sadie Irvine
Longue Vue was created for Edith and Edgar Stern with architects William and Geoffrey Platt and landscape designer Ellen Biddle Shipman. Formal axes, intimate garden rooms, water, native and adapted plants, and a house designed around outward views make the property useful for studying how landscape architecture directs movement and frames daily life.
Take the house and garden as one composition, but ask who maintained that apparent ease. Tours can address the Sterns’ philanthropy and civil-rights commitments alongside staff labor, material sourcing, changing horticulture, and post-hurricane restoration. Garden-only access and interior tours may follow different schedules, so choose the experience before arrival.
- Completed
- 1942
- Landscape
- Ellen Biddle Shipman
- Plan for
- 1½–2½ hours
Quick guide
- First
- Garden axis from house
- Reserve
- Interior tour if desired
Make the visit count
- Move room by room
- Notice each threshold, wall, hedge, step, and view that makes an outdoor space feel enclosed.
- Look back at the house
- Set beside it windows and terraces reveal that interior circulation was planned around garden views.
- Ask about labor
- Read irrigation, pruning, cleaning, and service routes sustain the designed calm.
- Study restoration
- Check identify which plantings and materials changed after storms.
Good to know
Use the public 7 Bamboo Road entrance, not private 11 Garden Lane. Storm restoration can affect trees, fountains, fences, and individual garden rooms even after the house and grounds reopen, so check the current recovery notice before visiting.
Notice these
- Spanish Court
- Canal Garden
- House-garden integration