In 1978, the New Orleans Spring Fiesta Association, which sponsors a series of home and plantation tours after Easter each year, inherited the house and its contents from Edna Tate Halbedel, who bought it in the early 1970s.

 

One of the conditions of Halbedel’s legacy was that portraits of herself and her husband, Harry, an automobile dealer who predeceased her, be placed in the foyer. Portraits of former Spring Fiesta presidents also hang in the house.

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The Spring Fiesta Home “doesn’t have a museum-y look because it’s always been lived in,” says director C. Donald Deggendorf.

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Through the years, individual owners have left their marks, including the addition of “all those little things like closets and good plumbing,” Deggendorf says. The present double-parlour was two separate rooms in the 1930s, and the dining room used to be a porch. The owner before Halbedel installed the marble floors.

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The house is furnished in Victorian style, representing the décor of the mid-1800s through the turn of the century, the director says. Much of the furniture is American Empire.