With the exception of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, the two local houses getting the most national attention this fall are seen on “Top Chef: New Orleans” and “American Horror Story: Coven.” One is a Bourbon Street mansion recently restored and dressed for TV. The other is a built-from-scratch set on a local soundstage.

Together, they’re visited by an average of more than 5 million viewers at 9 p.m. each Wednesday, not counting millions more who visit later via DVR, on-demand, online replay, pirated streams, etc.

The Bravo cooking competition and the FX supernatural drama share a time slot, with “Coven” drawing most of the combined audience total. Recent visits to both spaces revealed they also share links to New Orleans’ rich architectural history — one actually, the other movie-magically.

Cooking on Bourbon Street 

“Top Chef: New Orleans” occupied the nearly 5,000-square-foot house at 1231 Bourbon St.from late May through early July. Its interior “look” was adapted for TV by Charles Aubrey, the show’s production designer for this and several other seasons of the series and its spinoffs. His main tools were paint, (locally sourced) furnishings and artwork, and enough beds to house all of the show’s chef-contestants for the run of the production period.

“You’d think the most important thing is the kitchen,” Aubrey said. “The most important thing is the beds.”

Accordingly, the home’s bedrooms were divided by gender and packed with bunk beds.

A colorful paint scheme was used judiciously in most of the rooms to brighten the backgrounds behind the chefs, whose off-hours interactions were captured by cameras directed by Magical Elves, the California-based production company that makes “Top Chef” for Bravo.

“For television, they want to pop color here and there,” Aubrey said.

The “Top Chef” taste aesthetic is dialed way down from another reality show on Aubrey’s credits list, MTV’s “The Real World.” For several seasons of that series, including the 2010 season set in New Orleans, Aubrey fashioned the over-the-top cast-house decor that is a signature of that show’s seasons as they move from city to city.

His design for the Uptown New Orleans mansion converted for MTV’s “Real World” cameras included visual salutes to voodoo, cemeteries, food, Mardi Gras — even a scaled-down facsimile of a St. Charles Avenue streetcar just inside the home’s entry.

“I have to carefully pull back from my ‘Real World’ days and just give subtle hints of where we are,” Aubrey said of his “Top Chef” work. “The show as a whole benefited greatly from having a house like this, (which) shows the architecture of the city. We don’t always get that. I think when we were in Texas, we had a home in the middle of a neighborhood that could be Anywhere, U.S.A. In this house, in every background shot, you could tell where we were.”

One small visual note in the “Top Chef” house — a wide purple stripe that ran down the stairway — was a nod to Mardi Gras, but the interior in no way approached the gonzo “Real World” touches of Aubrey’s past.

“There is no other city in the world you would do that in, where it would fit,” Aubrey said of the purple staircase stripe. “It’s all beautiful, but I just like walking up and down the stairwell. From one vantage point, you can see the whole house, every floor, which is great. (The purple stripe was) just a subtle way of pulling all the floors together.”

Lauricella Bourbon Properties did the house’s literal heavy lifting in that regard long before Aubrey laid eyes on it. Once owned and occupied by the La Maison Hospitaliere nursing home, the three-story Creole townhouse (which shares a wall with another similarly restored townhouse) had been unoccupied and in disrepair for decades when renovations began in 2010.

Lauricella’s Kristen Nelson said her first thought when she saw the pre-rehab condition of the home was, “I hope the building does not crumble before we get our hands on it and restore it.

“The building had been neglected for quite some time, and it showed,” she continued. “It was an amazing experience to watch the transformation.”

The transformation concluded just a few months before Lauricella was approached by Magical Elves reps scouting for a “Top Chef” cast-house.

“When I first brought the proposition of leasing the property to a reality cooking show to Louis (Lauricella, the company’s director of development), he was extremely reluctant,” she said. “Our company had literally just finished investing two years in restoring these properties into mint condition, and the thought of the ‘Top Chef’ crew and 18 chefs moving in was nerve-wracking. After long, careful consideration and negotiations with the production company, Louis agreed to the terms, and we moved forward with the deal.”

The back-end of which included provisions for “Top Chef” to restore every detail on the property to its pre-production state.

“The set designers definitely had a different, much louder look than ours, but the house does look great on TV,” Nelson said. “I can’t lie, it did make me cringe watching one of the first episodes with 18 or so chefs cooking/spilling gumbo in every single room of the property, but thank goodness you would never know walking through it today.”

You also would never know — but a photo from the late 1930s or early 1940s indicates — that the first floor of 1231 Bourbon once housed the B.C. Francingues Bakery, foreshadowing its 21st century role on prime-time TV.

Aubrey, who also designs the arena kitchens for “Top Chef” — this season’s was housed in the old Mardi Gras World in Algiers, now dubbed the New Orleans Event & Film Studios — typically has about two weeks to do his work in a “Top Chef” house, but the production threw him a small, last-minute curve in New Orleans: The “Padma’s Picks” online preseason cook-off of New Orleans chefs that elevated Galatoire’s Michael Sichel and La Petite Grocery’s Justin Devillier into the regular season of the show was designed to advance just one chef to the Bourbon Street house. When the online competition concluded with host Padma Lakshmi picking two chefs, Aubrey had to scramble to make sure there was room to add another bed.

He also had to quickly alter the iconic knife block used to assign ingredients or courses during the show’s Quickfire challenges.

“We had to augment the existing block to somehow get one more knife slot,” Aubrey said of the game-piece adaptation that had to be executed in just a few hours. “It worked out really well.”

Coven’s lair

Smash-cut to Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, the interior of which is a built set on a soundstage that houses a lot of the action in “American Horror Story: Coven.” On the day I visited, Oscar-winning actress Kathy Bates filmed scenes for two episodes, both of which by now have already aired, so no spoiler alert is necessary.

One scene was with a Minotaur. The other, a zombie (actually the daughter of Bates’ character, Madame Delphine LaLaurie, re-animated by Marie Laveau, played by Oscar-nominated actress Angela Bassett).

The great (or terrible, depending) thing about “Coven,” which leaps through several eras while set among witches and New Orleans noir lore, is that neither scene approached being the weirdest things to have happened in that house.

Starring a murderers’ row cast of actresses (Jessica Lange, Lily Rabe, Frances Conroy, Sarah Paulson, Taissa Farmiga, Patti LuPone and Gabourey Sidibe, among others) who fearlessly animate the wild stories conceived by “Coven” co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk and their writing staff, “Coven” is the third season of a horror anthology miniseries that changes its story, though not its entire cast (Lange, Rabe and Paulson are among the repeaters), each season.

Creating Miss Robichaux’s home began with site visits around town and lots of photo-reference research.

“The interior of one house wasn’t necessarily the model,” said Mark Worthington, production designer for all three of “American Horror Story’s” seasons so far. “It was really more about what the script demanded in terms of the spaces, and marrying that to a Greco Roman Revival antebellum mansion in the Garden District. We have a variation that is not taken from any one house.

“I’ve never been a designer who’s interested in copying things. That’s not so much about ego, but I find that if you do that, it generally doesn’t necessarily match what the requirements of the action are.”

The interior-set design did have one major requirement: It had to plausibly pass for the interior of the Buckner Mansion, at 1410 Jackson Ave., where some of the show’s exteriors are shot (another home is used for the backyard shots of Miss Robichaux’s, such as the recent zombie attack answered by the Zoe character’s chain-saw defense).

“The footprint is similar,” Worthington said. “It’s not exact, but it’s close enough proportionately that you buy that the interior works for the exterior. One correspondence we needed is the window size from the Buckner house. Those are our windows.”

In addition to the tall windows, the set features even taller white walls, light-colored board floors and — an oddity in set design — an upstairs. The set’s second story contains bedrooms for the characters, some created by an imagined 20th century redesign that retrofit a bathroom around a fireplace.

Typically, stairways on stage sets lead nowhere — the staircase on “The Munsters,” for example, which otherwise housed the pet dragon Spot, did not lead to Eddie’s room — so a character’s journey to an upstairs room is achieved by cutting to a different ground-level set elsewhere on a soundstage.

For “Coven,” cameras can track characters from the downstairs “Ancestors Room” (lined with creepy painted portraits of the coven’s former “Supreme” leaders) to the upstairs and back, if scripts call for that.

“It was largely necessity,” Worthington said. “There wasn’t a stage large enough to (build) the second set.

“It’s a good thing in the sense that now we have continuous shots of people coming up that staircase. That has production value and gives a sense of veracity to the space, and just more scale, which is a good thing.”

Another scale-related facet of the set are extra-wide, extra-long downstairs hallways.

“Hallways equal horror,” Worthington said. “It’s a purpose-built space for suspense and tension, because (hallways) are transitional space. It’s all potential there, with all of these doors and turns and places and possibilities for who-knows-what to happen.

“It’s a time-honored tradition, I suppose.”

The devil, among other specters, is in the details of the “Coven” set. Local ornamental-plaster craftsman Tommy Lachin was hired by the production to fabricate ornate ceiling medallions, moldings and fireplace mantels — a six-week job during pre-production. (“Those kinds of plaster artists are rare and getting rarer every day,” Worthington said.)

Doorsills and doorways were dressed and distressed to simulate a century-plus of paint jobs. Light switches are antique push buttons. The plumbing under one upstairs sink leaks, creating a very lifelike stain in the downstairs ceiling directly beneath it, an accident with benefits.

“I saw that and thought, ‘Oh, God. There’s a stain,'” Worthington said. “Then I thought, ‘It’s kind of perfect. Let’s just leave it.’ All those houses have those problems.”

Set decorator Ellen Brill added the finishing touches with French-influenced furnishings sometimes selected for their odd silhouettes.

Like any set, however, this one isn’t built to last. It will be demolished piece-by-carefully-rendered-piece when the season wraps early next year.

Overseeing the strike process can be emotionally challenging, Worthington said. Sometimes, not so much.

“Sometimes it cathartic, and you want it to go away,” Worthington said. “For whatever reason, you’re fine with it.”

“American Horror Story” has been renewed by FX for a fourth season, though no announcement has been made about its theme or setting. Co-creator Murphy has said in interviews that he loves the New Orleans set so much that he’d love to do a spinoff.

Characters on this show have a hard time dying and staying dead, but barring a spinoff  re-animation, Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies will live an afterlife only on DVD boxed sets of “Coven.”

Source:  http://www.nola.com/homegarden/index.ssf/2013/11/top_chef_new_orleans_and_ameri.html