5 minute read
Maison Stéphanie
Stéphanie Says
In Arnaudville, a restored home echoes with centuries' worth of stories
Story and photos by Lucie Monk Carter
Who gave this French Creole estate her name? Ken Douet, co-owner and conscientious renovator of the ca. 1796 Maison Stéphanie, along Bushville Highway between Cecilia and Arnaudville, tells me that Stéphanie was nobody to original homeowner Martin Milony Duralde: not a wife (that’s Marie, mother of six) or a mistress (Sally, an enslaved woman, and mother to the six other Duraldes). Stéphanie is an idea, and an old one. In ancient Greek, stephanos—Στέφανος—is literally a wreath and symbolically a reward.
Duralde’s reward was 1,450 acres, deeded by the Spanish government, who appointed him commandant of the Opelousas Post. Ten owners later, over 225 years, the property has shrunk as heirs took their parcels, and time has gnawed and nudged at the cypress beams and brick walls. “We gutted the house and saw the bones,” said Douet, who purchased the home with his spouse Richard Howes in 2019. “Some of those bones were not very good.”
From old newspapers, oil paintings, and translated correspondence, Douet has been able to build a picture of Stephanie’s beginning. Louisiana ground was staked with new flags at the dawn of the nineteenth century, and Duralde catalogued his home along the Bayou Teche, a relatively exotic place, in letters that would be read by Thomas Jefferson.
Maison Stephanie’s original owner Martin Milony Duralde left an account of everything he owned, which current owners have used to better understand the house’s history.
Lucie Monk Carter
Duralde wrote of fossils from a creature he imagined to be an elephant—“but was probably a mastodon,” according to Douet—and he compiled vocabularies of the Chitimacha and the Attakapas, peoples with a more current claim to the earth than the mastodon had.
In his last will and testament, executed by his son Martin Duralde Jr. and sons-in-law William C.C. Claiborne (Louisiana’s first non-colonial governor) and John Clay (brother of Secretary of State Henry Clay), Duralde wrote a rigid account of his household goods, including the eighty people he enslaved and his descriptions of their skills, along with prices he was determined to fetch, even after his death in 1822.
Two hundred years later, Duralde’s will is a helpful document, but not the last word as Douet and Howes have transformed the house into a bed-and-breakfast and venue. The pair worked with Waycaster & Associates Architect, a Natchez, Mississippi firm specializing in historic renovations, and have a master plan for the property’s future from Lafayette firm Land Architecture. Douet himself served as contractor after receiving daunting quotes from other companies. “I had never done it before,” he said, “but if I could save $180,000 by learning how…”
The Lastrapes Room is named for the second family to own Maison Stephanie, and features a fireplace painted black, a remnant of post-Civil War decor used to save money.
Lucie Monk Carter
The house’s five bedrooms now each have a bathroom and a name connected with the house’s history: three Duralde women—Marie, Clarisse, and Julie—are honored on the second floor, while the two topfloor bedrooms are The Lastrapes, for the second family to own the home, and The Dubuisson. The latter’s namesake is Edward Dubuisson, an Opelousas lawyer, active member of the local theatre community, and a common relative of the Duraldes. Most importantly, he was a friend to Douet and Howes. He passed away in 2019. The bedroom furniture from his estate fills the room, along with a framed playbill and one of the columns he penned for the Opelousas newspaper. The paint color, “nearly a Prussian blue,” was chosen by Douet and Howes, who’d studied colors when building their own home in Lafayette. For this renovation, “I read four Ph.D. papers on colors from the 1760s,” said Douet. (He admitted his research can run off in different directions. “I”ll see a mention of how blood oranges were brought from the Philippines, then I go reading more on that before stopping myself. I have to say, ‘No, it’s not blood oranges I’m researching!’”)
In the Lastrapes Room at Maison Stephanie, you can still see bloody bootprints soaked into the cypress floors.
Lucie Monk Carter
In Duralde’s time, Prussian blue evoked royalty. In The Lastrapes room, a deep red on the walls is similarly imperial. But it’s another oncered touch on the bedroom floor that will cling to the memory: bootprints from Confederate soldiers soaked into the unfinished cypress when the room was used as a hospital during the Civil War.
Douet and Howes have left other warts, if that’s how you choose to view them. One fireplace is painted black, a cheap choice many Southern families made after the Civil War. Axe marks are seen in cypress beams along one stairwell wall, along with an original paint color, “a shade above Pepto Bismol” that the couple modified into a dusky rose on the ground level.
The first flight of stairs was rebuilt to code, but the upper set remains steep and narrow. A grandchild of the Halphen family, the house’s eighth owners, toured the house last fall with Douet. She burst into tears walking up the old cypress stairwell. “I rolled marbles on these stairs. I’m that little girl again, running up to play in the unused bedrooms.”
The bedrooms are filling up now, with more options in the backyard, including the cottage (“Sally”) and the carriage house (two rooms, “Martin” and “Valmont”). Relocated from nearby Arnaudville, two Acadian cottages wait in pieces to be rebuilt.
“Douet points to the woods back by the pond where he hopes they’ll build a new structure soon.” Shrouded by trees, “it will be totally different from everything,” said Douet. “Mostly glass, so that when you’re looking out into the woods, your exterior is your interior. That will be our home.”
Ken Douet, pictured in front of Maison Stephanie.
Lucie Monk Carter
In the months ahead, Maison Stéphanie has a calendar full of weddings, festivals, Christmas parties, and poetry nights for high school French students. Kayaks will come up the bayou and walking trails are planned through the woods, from Maison Stéphanie through to Atelier de la Nature, the preserve run by artist Brandon Ballengée and his wife Aurore.
Douet shows off the newly built backyard kitchen—named “Evelyn” for the home’s most recent owner, and an avid cook, the late Evelyn Kidder. 2017’s Queen of Louisiana Seafood Bonnie Breaux is among the guest chefs who will cook up breakfasts, teach cooking classes, and cater events, like the Festival des Arts, which is a few weeks away when I visit but already a clear vision in Douet’s head: thirty artists and craftspeople in the front yard, beneath the live oaks.
But Douet’s fondest memory so far comes from a night before any work had been done. “We had a Christmas party in 2019, right after we bought the house. We had 250 people here, including the Attakapas chief and his daughter from Lake Charles,” he said. “All of us were there together, Indigenous people, Black people, Cajuns—in this land that was called Attakapas, with the bricks that were put in by enslaved people. We were there for a rebirth.”
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