Stylist’s features editor Lucy Foster heads off the tourist trail in America’s beguiling southern city of New Orleans.

New Orleans is not the sort of place you immediately associate with chic New York-style loft living. Instead, you think of hawkers selling voodoo card readings in the French Quarter, the Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Treme district, or brass band renditions of When The Saints Go Marching In, which we heard at least 16 times during our 36 hours in Louisiana’s largest city.

Yes, you can throw yourself into all these elements of New Orleans, but we wanted something a little more removed from the tourist trail, and that’s just what we found. Loft 523, a 16-suite boutique hotel (which houses two penthouses too), is a study in modern design. And, like all high-end establishments in 2013, it’s almost impossible to find. We walked past the copper doors five times before employing the process of elimination, taking a step back to study the numbers of neighbouring buildings, and then working out which door we should walk through.

Finally inside, I could see a solitary desk at the end of a cool, concrete and copper lobby. There was a computer. There was a man. There was one seat for sitting. It could have been an east London art installation. “Hi there,” says the man, shutting down some sleek Apple device. “We have two nights booked?” I reply in a tone that clearly communicates my incredulity that me and this extraordinarily sleek hotel are to become bedfellows. In fact, as matches go, I’d say the hotel’s come out of this pretty badly.

Two minutes later, with husband and two battered suitcases in tow, I’m in a lift up to the fourth floor. They don’t have room numbers here, they have room letters. In fact, they don’t have rooms; they have 600sq ft suites (by way of comparison, that’s as big as a two-bedroom London flat).

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