Ask the team · Bywater, New Orleans
The Art Program
New Orleans outside, New Orleans inside.
The art here was made for these rooms — painted, tufted, and built directly onto the walls by New Orleans artists.
CastleDay is run, designed, and operated by locals — and the same goes for the art. The idea was a simple one: bring the outside in. This is the Bywater, a neighborhood of shotgun cottages in every color, of ironwork and louvered shutters, of music from the corner bars and the river just over the levee. We asked artists from the city to carry that world indoors and let it settle into the rooms where you're staying.
The works arrive in as many forms as the city itself — hand-painted murals, tufted canvases, screenprinted mobiles, and macramé — each one composed for the exact wall it lives on. Staying with us? A printed guide lives in every villa, and it's yours to keep when you go.
Mural & painting · The dining rooms
Maddie Stratton
Local artist Maddie Stratton, known for her color and her use of animals and flora, extends her original paintings across the dining-room walls through contrasting one-colour murals and found objects.
Each villa gets its own subject: at The Herald, the warehouse next door — once home to the tractors that pulled the Mardi Gras floats down St. Charles Avenue; at The Cocodrie, the Mississippi seen from Crescent Park, the Bywater's green stretch just over the old railway tracks.
@maddiestratton →Mural · The living rooms
Hill Landry
Muralist Hill Landry applies bold colour and clean shape to Louisiana reptilia — snakes and alligators at room scale, playing against the square-window grid of each villa's main accent wall. Most groups pick their villa by his mural.
@hill.handed →Screenprinted mobile · The stairwells
Antonia Zennaro
Zennaro's photo-based screenprinted mobiles reflect CastleDay's home on Japonica Street — the bridges, trains and waterways nearby turning slowly above the stairwell, with cameos of the site's SPCA past.
@antoniazennaro →Mural & painting · The bedrooms
Zac Maras
Painted cutouts of staple Louisiana species in Zac Maras's signature style — fish surfacing across a Florentine bedroom wall in drifting motion, and a crawfish, emblem of the springtime boil, standing proud of the wall at The Cocodrie.
@zmarasart →Tufted paintings · The bedrooms
Jess C.X
Inspired by Henry Fisk's meandering maps of the Mississippi's old channels and their pull on migratory bird paths, multimedia artist Jess C.X traces that relationship in tufted works above the beds.
@jessc.x →Mural & macramé · The bedrooms
Weepy Weaver
Around mid-March it's impossible to ignore the yellow flowers cropping up from overgrown vines atop New Orleans houses. Catherine Goll (Weepy Weaver) plays with dimension, recreating that classic image in fabric and weave — chartreuse-and-gold yarn cascading over a painted cottage like cat's-claw vine in full April bloom.
@weepyweaver →Painting · The bedrooms
Epaul Julien
Epaul takes discarded New Orleans fleur-de-lis window frames and gives them new life as canvases, displaying striking portraits of the city's music icons: Louis Armstrong at The Herald, Fats Domino at The Cocodrie, and Mahalia Jackson at The Florentine — the city's emblem haloing each of them.
@epauljulienart →CastleDay is local at heart and bold by design — just like the surrounding Bywater. The creative energy of the neighborhood flows through the space, giving it a sense of place you won't find anywhere else.
See it in person
The gallery comes with beds.
Every stay sleeps inside the collection — pick your villa by the mural, and the rest of the walls come with it.
Pick your villa