Anne Rice's Houses: From Rosegate in New Orleans to La Quinta

Five houses are tied to Anne Rice in the records and the press. Three were in New Orleans: Rosegate, the Garden District mansion she bought in 1989 and sold in 2004; St. Elizabeth's, a former orphanage she bought in 1993 and sold around 2003; and a Victorian on St. Charles Avenue that she bought in the early 1990s and sold in 2011. Two were in the California desert: a house in Rancho Mirage from December 2005 to June 2011, and a house in La Quinta from December 2014 until she died on December 11, 2021, at 80. All five belong to other people now.

The one most readers mean is Rosegate, the Garden District house that became the Mayfair family's home in her witch novels.

We do not print the street address. The neighborhood, the house's federal survey history, and its place on the map are on Anne Rice's Rosegate home profile.

Rosegate, 1989 to 2004

The federal government measured and photographed this house in 1964 for the Historic American Buildings Survey, the National Park Service's archive of buildings worth keeping on paper, and that survey file is the fullest public history of the house. Albert Hamilton Brevard bought the land in 1852 and signed the building contract in January 1857, with James Calrow as architect and Charles Pride as the builder. Emory Clapp bought the house from Brevard's son-in-law in 1869, and the Clapps soon added the six-sided library wing. His widow, Pamela, lived there until her death in 1934. The surveyors judged it a particularly fine example of the long, narrow two-story houses the Garden District built in the 1850s.

At mid-century a federal judge lived there. John Minor Wisdom, of the appeals bench, bought the house in 1947 and was still in it when the surveyors came.

The Rices bought it in 1989, and it went straight into the fiction. The Witching Hour, published the next year, made the house the Mayfair family's home. Rice wrote on Facebook in 2014 that the house figured in five of her novels, according to Salon. She shared it with her husband, the poet and painter Stan Rice, until his death in 2002, and sold it in 2004.

Where Mayfair Witches was filmed

AMC could not film at Rice's own house for its 2023 series Mayfair Witches, according to Salon. The production shot much of the Mayfair home at an 1875 mansion nearby with a similar front, a private house that is not open to visitors. Our earlier version of this page called both Rosegate and St. Elizabeth's filming locations for the series. Neither was, and St. Elizabeth's belongs to a different book.

St. Elizabeth's, 1993 to about 2003

The second house was an institution first. Builder Thomas Mulligan put up its brick central block in the mid-1860s, according to the Society of Architectural Historians, and in 1871 the Daughters of Charity moved their home for orphaned girls aged 14 to 18 into it, adding a wing in 1883. The sisters closed the home in 1989. Rice's own site calls the three buildings the city's largest cluster of Second Empire architecture, the French style of steep mansard roofs.

Anne and Stan Rice bought the complex in 1993 and added a ballroom, a writing studio for her, and a painting studio for him, according to author Sally Asher, who dates the sale to 2003, shortly after his death. Rice had childhood friends at St. Elizabeth's, Country Roads reported in 2018, and she later filled it with her dolls on glass shelving upstairs and down; 88 of them were nuns. Asher also notes that Lestat gives the place a nod in Memnoch the Devil, the 1995 novel that ends with the vampire confined in a New Orleans orphanage.

The developer KFK Group finished turning the complex into 28 condominiums and five new townhomes in 2004. It is private housing now, and its story is on Anne Rice's St. Elizabeth's profile.

The St. Charles Avenue Victorian, early 1990s to 2011

Our earlier page got this house most wrong. It called it a Garden District home and gave it the years 1989 to 2004, which are Rosegate's. The house stands Uptown, a little upriver of the Garden District, according to Second Shelters, and it is a Victorian of the 1880s. WAFB reported in 2018 that its center hall had stained glass from that decade and a mahogany and cypress staircase.

Rice bought it while she was writing Lasher, the 1993 second book of her Mayfair trilogy, according to Second Shelters, and the house crossed into the books too. Second Shelters says one of the Mayfair families lived here, and the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report called it an inspiration for the family's New Orleans home in the series. NBC reported in November 2011 that Rice was selling it, and Second Shelters later wrote that she sold it that year. The house has its own page: Anne Rice's St. Charles Avenue house.

Rancho Mirage, December 2005 to June 2011

After Stan Rice's death, she left New Orleans to be near their son, the novelist Christopher Rice. She tried La Jolla first, then moved inland to Rancho Mirage. In late 2005 she bought a house in Thunderbird Heights, the hillside neighborhood beside Thunderbird Country Club. Lauren Beale, the Los Angeles Times Hot Property columnist, dated the house to 1995 and named what Rice changed: new flagstones around the pool, fruit trees and oleanders, a fireplace in the den. Beale's column also credits the house with three books, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, the memoir Called Out of Darkness, and the thriller Angel Time.

In May 2010 Rice put the house up for sale at $3.3 million. “I’ve loved it here in Thunderbird Heights,” she told Beale, and she said she hoped to find a smaller place to write somewhere else in the Coachella Valley. By March 2011 the asking price was down to $2,915,000, according to real-estate blog posts of the time, an ActiveRain post among them.

The county record closes the story. The Riverside County Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder's index, the public list of every deed filed in the county, shows a deed from Anne Rice recorded on June 1, 2011, the date the county recorded her exit. The index carries no price for that deed, so this page gives none. Her years in the house are on Anne Rice's Rancho Mirage house.

La Quinta, her final home, December 2014 to 2021

In December 2014, three and a half years after leaving Rancho Mirage, Rice bought a house farther down the valley in La Quinta, according to the same county records, and she owned it for the rest of her life. Earlier versions of this page placed the house in Palm Desert. It is in La Quinta, and it was her final home.

Rice died on December 11, 2021, at 80. A sale of the house was recorded six days later, on December 17, 2021, at $760,000, the price the county record carries for that deed; our earlier page said $750,000.

Two houses that were never hers

Our earlier page also sent readers to two houses she never owned. The Buckner Mansion in the Garden District is the witches' school in American Horror Story: Coven, according to Louisiana's state tourism office, and it has no tie to Rice. Oak Alley Plantation, upriver in Vacherie, played the family home of the vampire Louis in the 1994 film of Interview with the Vampire, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Rice's link to Oak Alley is that film and nothing more.