For many, these eight corner guest rooms offer the most compelling experience of any hotel in downtown New Orleans. With 12' ceilings and two window-walls of natural light clad in theatrical sheers and velveteen drapes, each room feels particularly spacious and freeing to the human spirit. Like New Orleans, there is an ecclesiastical and handmade element woven into the design. Gali Art's wrought-iron bedside tables with cruciform feet, Erica Larken's totem-inspired cafe tables and the Pagan Cross corner console ebonized and silver-leafed, are each topped with honed Calacatta gold marble. Sharp Aquos flat-screens and iPod players are within easy reach. A generous seating area includes a 5' x 8' mirror, crystal chandelier and an "LM Chair", an antiqued velvet chair from the designer’s original collection. The sprawling California King bed, with its 7' tufted headboard and layers of white on white linens is framed dramatically by tall hammered-nickel lamps and animated by the slow moving Modern Fan Company "Flute" fan above. Generous bathrooms feature dark granite vanities with oval Kallista basins and an unusually elegant vanity light dressed in strands of cascading Swarovski crystals. The closet is also customized. Like the suites and penthouses, these guest rooms radiate this city's signature sense of place and the optimism of this new time.