Anne Rice's House (former)

Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire, the 1976 novel that launched her Vampire Chronicles, and the Mayfair Witches books set in her native New Orleans. She died in 2021 at 80.

Builder Thomas Mulligan put up the brick central block in the mid-1860s. The Daughters of Charity moved their vocational home for orphaned girls aged 14 to 18 here in 1871, and a wing followed in 1883.

The sisters closed the home in 1989 and moved its program across the river to Marrero. Anne’s own site calls the 3 buildings the city’s largest cluster of Second Empire architecture.

Anne and her husband, painter and poet Stan Rice, bought the complex in 1993 and added a ballroom and studios for each of them. She sold it in 2003, shortly after his death, according to author Sally Asher.

Anne had childhood friends at Saint Elizabeth’s, according to Country Roads, and later filled it with her dolls. Glass shelving ran upstairs and down, and 88 of them were nun dolls.

Asher notes that Lestat gives the house a nod in Memnoch the Devil, the 1995 novel that ends with the vampire confined in a New Orleans orphanage. It came out 2 years after Anne bought the place.

Developer KFK Group finished turning the complex into 28 condos and 5 newly built townhomes in 2004. It is private housing today, so the view you get is from the sidewalk.