Of all the boutique hotels that have landed in New Orleans over the past few years, none gets into the bones of the city like this one. Beyond the heavy mint-green doors, the foyer smells of gardenias. It’s bright, airy, colourful, with a canary-yellow check-in counter and equally bright welcome. Star design team Ash NYC has revived the former 19th-century Catholic church, schoolhouse, convent, and rectory in the boho Marigny neighbourhood, just northeast of the French Quarter and a walk from the sax-trumpet-clarinet licks of jazz epicentre Frenchmen Street. As with other Ash NYC hotels – The Dean, in a 1912 clergy house in Providence; the Siren, filling a Renaissance Revival building in Detroit – this place is meant to double as a destination, with sophisticated communal spaces that beg to be sat in with a chicory coffee or a Sazerac. In a city of sensory overload, Hotel Peter & Paul is the anti – Bourbon Street, where the bed linen is crisp – and a little austere, like a convent holdover – and the crowd at its Elysian Bar, brought to you by homegrown wine bar Bacchanal, is European-house-party cool.