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.

The couple added curved cabinetry and a window seat to form a breakfast nook, painted in Farrow & Ball Red Earth. The table is discontinued from Anthropologie, where Kara previously worked as a display coordinator, and the overhead light is the Lambert & Fils Waldorf Double.
The couple added curved cabinetry and a window seat to form a breakfast nook, painted in Farrow & Ball Red Earth. The table is discontinued from Anthropologie, where Kara previously worked as a display coordinator, and the overhead light is the Lambert & Fils Waldorf Double.

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 1900-square-foot home for their family of four.
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 1900-square-foot home for their family of four.

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.
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.

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.
Before: The couple refinished the existing Heart Pine floors throughout.

See the full story on Dwell.com: Before & After: Rich Color and Millwork Revive a Historic New Orleans Shotgun Home for $198K
Related stories: