Nine Details That Make HNOC’s New Museum Facility Unique

2. Every brick was touched

The building and restoration project consisted of three discrete parts: demolition, structural repair, and build out. Each of these phases makes way for the next, and in the case of demolition, HNOC learned that the historic Seignouret-Brulatour Building and its rear service wings were all in poor shape. HNOC Vice President Daniel Hammer said that over the course of the process every single brick in the historic structure was handled. After crews stripped off the plaster, they started the meticulous process of examining—and replacing, if need be—every brick in the structure. The building was shored and, working on one side of a wall at a time, plaster was removed, the mortar holding the bricks together was chipped out, deteriorated bricks were replaced, new mortar was pointed between the bricks, and then, finally, the walls were covered in breathable, lime-based plaster.  

To ensure the longevity of the structure, modern, cement-based mortars and plasters employed during past renovations of the building were replaced with natural products, very similar to what would have been used at the time of original construction of the historic buildings. The existing materials retained too much of the moisture the bricks naturally absorb from the ground, ultimately causing many bricks to disintegrate. The new, lime-based plaster will allow an easier transfer of moisture to prevent the bricks from crumbling.

4. An unexpected discovery: the original color

While removing nonhistorical sheetrock from the Seignouret-Brulatour Building, crews noticed that an 1822 addition had separated from the original 1816 structure. While this meant that additional shoring and structural work would be needed, the rift also gave us important insight into the building’s original appearance. A section of wall that had been covered in 1822, only six years after it had been built, revealed the original color of the building—a stunning ochre. Architectural material analysis by Cypress Building Conservation confirmed that this was the original exterior plaster from 1816. Subsequently, the newly discovered, 200-year-old color was added to the plaster for the exterior walls.

6. The building is now (more) level

Leveling an 1816 building can be tricky, but leveling an 1816 building in the French Quarter, with its foundation on less-than-firm soil, is just about impossible. Barry Siegel of Bywater Woodworks remembered that, when shoring the Seignouret-Brulatour Building, they realized that the entire structure could not be made completely flat. “You can raise and lower, but sometimes you have marks that you have to hit, like the top of a staircase,” said Siegel. “So, it’s not completely level, but it’s more level than it was before.”

8. Layers of wallpaper revealed the historic fabric of the site

Peeling back layers of old wallpaper in the Seignouret-Brulatour Building gave our decorative arts team insight into the literal fabric of the building. Following work by Cypress Building Conservation to extract, separate, and clean each layer of paper, Decorative Arts Curator Lydia Blackmore—with the help of intern Isabel Dissard-Cooper from the Tulane Masters in Preservation Studies program—went to work cataloging and identifying as many of the patterns as she could. “Looking at decorations like wallpaper is really interesting,” said Blackmore. “Each layer tells us about the inhabitants from a different time period, and by identifying style and quality, you can even trace the economic history French Quarter as a whole from its glamorous early days, to the 19th-century tenements, to the 20th-century preservation movement.” Among the samples found were layers of wallpaper installed by the building’s original owner, François Seignouret, including a swatch from fashionable Parisian manufacturer Joseph Dufour and Company.