Before & After: Rich Color and Millwork Revive a Historic New Orleans Shotgun Home for $198K
A designer couple collaborate on a breakneck, six-month remodel to ready their 1910 home for their new baby.
A designer couple collaborate on a breakneck, six-month remodel to ready their 1910 home for their new baby.
When Seamus McGuire first toured this 1910 home in the Touro/Bouligny neighborhood of New Orleans, he saw something that other potential buyers did not. "A lot of people passed on the house," he says.
It was a classic double shotgun measuring 25-feet-wide and 75-feet-deep, with five interior fireplaces and a front porch stretching across both entries. The previous owner had lived there for 70 years, inhabiting one side and renting out the other. Over the decades, they made some changes to the home’s historic bones, adding the iron railing around the porch and dropped ceilings in a few bedrooms.
"Too often, instead of repairing the old plaster ceiling, people drop another ceiling below it," says Seamus. "Walking through this house, I noticed it actually has a 12-foot-6 ceiling—I just started seeing the potential."
Before: Exterior
Before: Seamus and Kara McGuire bought this classic double shotgun home in New Orleans for $460,000 in 2020, with plans to remodel and merge the side-by-side units into one 1,900-square-foot home for their family of four.
Courtesy of CICADA
After: Exterior
Seamus rebuilt the front porch to be more historically accurate, and the couple painted everything in Pink Ground by Farrow & Ball—except the porch ceiling, which has Little Boy Blue by Sherwin Williams.
Photo: Seamus Payne
Seamus and his wife, Kara, were deliberating whether to purchase a fixer and remodel it themselves, or buy something turnkey. "Us being designers, we were like, let’s purchase low—even though it needs a lot of work—so we can put our own hand on it," says Seamus, who is an architect and founding partner of the firm Cicada; Kara is a graphic designer and partner at the studio Also Known As.
| $12,000 Roofing | $7,500 Exterior Paint | $4,800 Exterior Siding Repair |
| $19,000 Electrical | $16,000 Mechanical | $20,000 Plumbing |
| $6,294 Dining Room | $9,500 Furniture, Fixtures, & Equipment | $29,958 Kitchen (see chart below) |
| $10,957 Bathroom | $12,090 Wood Flooring | $11,150 Framing & Drywall |
| $5,000 Interior Paint | $962 Windows | $5,000 Doors |
| $2,340 Gutters | $10,000 Demolition | $266 Permit |
| $4,500 Tile Installation | $3,485 Breakfast Nook | $7,500 Dining Room Built-Ins |
| Grand Total: $198,302 | ||
The only caveat? They would be doing all of the design and much of the construction work themselves, and they had to finish before their second child was born, which gave them a seven-month window. (They finished in six.) "We knew what we could do ourselves," says Kara, as they had remodeled a home together before. "But I was going to be less help this round because I was very pregnant"—and she would be taking on the bulk of the childcare duties for their toddler.
Before: Dining Room
Before: The couple refinished the existing heart pine floors throughout.
Courtesy of CICADA
See the full story on Dwell.com: Before & After: Rich Color and Millwork Revive a Historic New Orleans Shotgun Home for $198K
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