The Maidstone: Mid-Century Cool + Southern Soul in the Heart of New Orleans
Motor lodge bones, Studio Tre magic, moonlit modern romance
From Crescent Motel to Design-Forward Micro-Resort
Once the Crescent Motel (and later The Drifter), this 1956 American motor lodge has been completely reborn as The Maidstone — an intimate, mid-century retreat in the Mid-City neighborhood, reimagined by Studio Tre with a designer’s eye and a sensual sense of place. Step into the lobby and the first thing you see is that green maestro quartzite check-in desk — bold, sculptural, practically cinematic — framed by floor-to-ceiling glazed porcelain walls. The color palette is pure Louisiana: Spanish moss sage, magnolia leaf olive, swamp grass green, bayou rust. It feels like the region itself got edited into a mid-century dream sequence.
Where Mid-Century America Meets New Orleans Heat
The Maidstone Lounge is the emotional core of the interior — plush banquettes, mahogany-and-marble coffee tables, ceiling beams overhead, terrazzo underfoot, a leopard wool rug grounding the space with a wink of 1950s glamour. It’s the kind of lounge that makes you want to order something stirred, something brown, something classic — because mid-century America was always better at mood than minimalism, and here, mood wins.
Eighteen Rooms, Deep in Texture + Quiet Intelligence
Guestrooms have been renovated with that same Studio Tre rigor: cork flooring, custom birch millwork, rattan mirrors, birch ply bed frames, furniture with rich natural textures. The beds are dressed with Frette linens. And above them — custom moon tapestries by Oaxacan textile artist Ismael Gutierrez Montano. The rooms feel minimal in form, maximal in soul. It’s modernism softened by nature, softened by New Orleans, softened by intimacy.
A Garden That Feels Like a Southern Film Set
Outside, the Maidstone world expands. A saltwater pool. A bathing deck. A tiled wall fountain trickling over ceramic. Green-and-white striped solar shades sway like costuming. Textiles pop in indigo, chartreuse, olive, electric orange. This is tropical Americana — not borrowed from Miami or Palm Springs — born from the wetlands and the humid green of Louisiana.
And when day turns to night, the Moon Garden takes over — a sunken fire pit flickering in the open air. That’s when the hotel becomes something else entirely — less motor lodge nostalgia, more modernist moon ceremony.
DNA Hotels Verdict
The Maidstone is what New Orleans needed and didn’t yet have — a mid-century micro-resort with genuine design intelligence, sensual tactility, and a perfect sense of scale. A calm, cinematic alternative to the French Quarter’s maximal noise. A 1956 motor lodge reborn not as a gimmick — but as a mood. Lush, edited, poetic. A hotel that proves small can be the most seductive of all.
