How to Turn Your Bedroom into a Suite at Hotel Peter and Paul

A step-by-step Room Recipe

Welcome back to Room Recipe, a column on À La Carte where we stare at an image of a room we love for a very long time, then break down its “ingredients” into specific items and themes. The goal is never to copy, but instead to get to the bottom of why certain rooms just *work* and to understand how we can translate that inspiration into real life.

I know for a fact that I’ve used an image of a room at Hotel Peter and Paul in a mood board (or five). For somewhere I’ve never been, it’s a place I reference pretty regularly. The New Orleans–based hotel was a Catholic church in its previous life. What used to be a school, a rectory, and a convent are now 71 guest rooms and two appropriately-named dining spaces: Elysian Bar and Sunday Best.

Images via Hotel Peter and Paul

Ash Hotels, the hotel group behind Hotel Peter and Paul, is known for its design prowess and attention to detail. Each of their properties is an ode to the past, but told through a lens of modernity and with a little bit of humor. A room at Hotel Peter and Paul might be filled with opulent French antiques and bits of religious iconography, but it’s also drenched in primary-colored, mix-and-match ginghams and stripes with robes to match. The door signs guests hang to signal for room cleaning read “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Basically, if Wes Anderson made a movie about the Catholic church, it might look a little something like this.

Going as hard into the gingham thing as Hotel Peter and Paul does here takes careful planning and intention to get juuuust right. It’s sort of the opposite of that collected look that’s popular right now; you can’t just pick up a bunch of ginghams from random places and expect them to look as cohesive as these rooms do. In a perfect world you’re finding one fabric supplier and working with textiles that use the exact same colors at different scales… which is expensive. But that’s not what a Room Recipe is for! We’re just getting inspired here. So whether you’re working with a designer and have the utmost control over every decision, or you’re thrifting your bedroom together over a long period of time, there’s lots to glean from the composition of each of Hotel Peter and Paul’s guest rooms, no two of which are exactly alike.

And lastly, one thing I’ll say before we dig into the recipe: Gingham can look pretty twee, especially when used en masse. Where you can, lean into the “I’m in an old, probably haunted church” vibe over a “cutesy cottage in the country” vibe. No white furniture, no floral prints, no scallops. Got it? Great. Let’s get into the recipe.