Louisiana Made

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Surface Safari

  Connecting her bedroom to her sister’s and to the den, the triangular fireplace in the middle of the old 1910s home designer Hope Johnson grew up in provided not only ample opportunity for post-bedtime whispers — “mostly, I…

Cut and Dried

Belief in the resurrection runs deep in Dreux Barra’s life, and as it turns out, in his gumbo pot, too. The Youngsville-based food entrepreneur’s holy trinity mix — that’s bell pepper, celery and onion, for those unbaptized in the wild…

Beading Rhythms

New Orleans is a gumbo of people of all different nationalities and races and all those people show a lot of love to each other,” says artist and Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief Demond Melancon. “I’m part of that gumbo.”…

Love and Light

Illumination is a delicate thing. Like collaboration, it can take intentionality, an understanding of the environment and a sharp eye to make it most effective. Lafayette’s Boonies Design + Fabrication knows a lot about light and creativity — their…

Go With Your Gut

It takes a lot of courage to launch a new culinary brand, but for Kaitlynn Fenley and Jon Scott Chachere, the creative couple has guts down to a science. As an informative wellness blog-turned-fermented foods brand, Cultured Guru is backed…

A Louisiana Life: Let it Bee

When Sarah Shult needs to relax after a hectic week in retail, she often finds calm in the steady buzz of her beehives. “It’s where I find my peace,” Shult said. The 33-year-old Thibodaux resident and her wife, Rachel LeCompte,…

Art: Chaos and Order

Randell Henry of Baton Rouge is a remarkable artist who creates vibrant and often cryptic paintings and collages that reflect an imagination and intellect drawn to the rhythms and cultures of Africa and the African-American experience. …

Louisiana Made: Arts and Sciences

You see a lot of things out in the wild, but if nothing else, Sandra Walkin believes in resurrection. Reaching out beyond her sun-drenched, glassed-in porch, thousands of pines, pecans, winged elms, river birches and more stand as towering reminders…

Louisiana Made: Well Armed

Rounding the corner past a path of palms, ferns and lilies in the expanse of the greenhouse, Harper runs beaming, her arms waving wide like falcon wings. The young girl refuses to take off her new jacket; she pleads with…

Louisiana Made: So Fresh and So Clean

When bathing (thankfully) began trending again in the 19th century, the search was on for ways to produce affordable soap on a large enough scale to keep the working class disease-free, healthy and able to fill the factories and fields…

Art: Evangeline Revisited

“Lovely the moonlight was as it glanced and gleamed on the water, Gleamed on the columns of cypress and cedar sustaining the arches, Down through whose broken vaults it fell as through chinks in a ruin. Dreamlike, and indistinct, and…

Louisiana Made: Pitcher Perfect

If you’re speeding or texting you’ll probably miss it, but tucked away in a beige block of industrial-looking storehouses off a small side road in Hammond, stands what the Brewers Association has twice named one of the 50 fastest-growing craft…

Along the Way: Bovine Blues

My people aren’t hunters. We shoot and we eat, but we don’t shoot what we eat. It’s just not in our DNA, I suppose. At least it doesn’t appear to be part of the genetic makeup of the five generations…

Louisiana Made: Dream Weaver

The opulent palaces and forested expanses of foothills stretching up to the highs of the Himalayas were enthralling, but Trishala Bhansali found her creativity molded more by muslins and silk brocade and block prints. The entrepreneur witnessed these among the…

Artfully Loaded

It’s no surprise that in a state that brands itself “Sportsman’s Paradise,” the art and craft of fine firearms is very much alive and well. Our neighbors include stockmakers, metalsmiths, engravers and restorers, several of whom are working at such…

A Louisiana Life: Going Nuts

For a long time, it seemed as if the trajectory of Jady Regard’s career would see him climbing the ladder in sales and marketing for professional sports teams. In college at LSU, he was a student manager for the men’s…

Home Grown

Louisiana has always been a state that values its own, and local businesses play a big role in helping the state’s unique culture thrive. The state’s culture bearers, artists and craftsmen are part of what bring visitors internationally to see…

Literary Louisiana: Beach Books

Southern Lady Code: Essays by Helen Ellis While writer Helen Ellis hails from Alabama, her newest book, “Southern Lady Code,” and its humorous tales, advice and nonsense, will ring true with Louisiana ladies from the tip of the boot to…

Louisiana Made: Sweet Preservation

Their fingers were crimson — almost stained — and with bellies full like the certainty of a cicada song at sunset, baskets of strawberries remained, and a decision had to be made. “There were just too many, and we didn’t…

Louisiana Made: Metal Winner

As far as daily commutes go, David Cano’s is hard to beat. It runs from the recently renovated second-floor loft apartment directly above his wife’s letterpress studio to just down the street at the expansive metal fabrication shop where, with…

Louisiana Made: Making Scents

There’s a deeply NOLA phenomenon that could be described as a kind of neon twilight. It happens when the last of a humid day’s sunset shines off a low-slung sky blanket hanging, it seems, just out of reach, and casts…

Literary Louisiana: Take Flight

Audubon on Louisiana Selected Writings of John James Audubon, edited by Ben Forkner Known perhaps as the greatest naturalist painter, John James Audubon will forever be linked to the state of Louisiana. During his time traveling up and down the…