Anne Rice's House (former)

Gothic novelist whose 1976 debut, Interview with the Vampire, launched the Vampire Chronicles and became the 1994 film with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Born in New Orleans in 1941, Anne Rice died in December 2021, at 80.

Rice bought the house in 1989 and shared it with her husband, poet Stan Rice, until his death in 2002. She sold it in 2004 and moved to California.

The house became the Mayfair family’s home in The Witching Hour, published in 1990, the year after Rice moved in. She wrote on Facebook in 2014 that it figured in 5 of her novels in all.

The iron fence is worked with rosettes, which is why the house is often called Rosegate. Federal surveyors in 1964 called it a particularly fine example of the long, narrow Garden District mansions of the 1850s.

Albert Hamilton Brevard bought this lot in 1852, the year New Orleans annexed the old City of Lafayette. His January 1857 building contract names architect James Calrow and master builder Charles Pride.

Brevard died around 1859, and in 1869 his son-in-law sold the house to Emory Clapp. The Clapps soon added the hexagonal library wing, and Emory’s widow, Pamela, lived here until her death in 1934.

Judge John Minor Wisdom bought the house in 1947 and still lived here when federal surveyors recorded it in 1964. On the appeals bench, he wrote the ruling ordering the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith.

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 the Soria-Creel House, an 1875 mansion nearby with a similar front.