Venus House - Opelousas, LA - U.S. National Register of Historic Places on Waymarking.com

Located at the US Highway 190 welcome center, The Venus House was easy to walk around and photograph. Was closed on my visit. The welcome center is part of "Le Vieux Village" (The Old Village) and is a nice walk through and around numerous buildings and displays of St. Landry Parish heritage. I found a good history on the house from the Louisiana Register application page, located here.
The Venus House is locally significant in the area of architecture within the context of St. Landry Parish. Its importance arises from its extreme age as well as from the rarity of certain of its Creole features. With its c.1800 construction date, the Venus House stands as one of St. Landry Parish's oldest surviving structures. Although the area was once a center of French settlement, only a handful of exceptionally old Creole buildings survive. Instead, most of St. Landry's antebellum houses date to the period of Greek Revival influence. The Creole features found in the Venus House are important for the following reasons: 1. The existence of a central room higher than the rooms surrounding it is very rare. 2. The floorplan is important because plans with two equal sized chambres flanking the salle are now rare. They were once characteristic of the Creole houses of Louisiana's prairie region. 3. The Venus House's construction technology (joists mortised into the outsides of the salle's wall posts) is significant because it illustrates a stage in the evolution of the Louisiana house from its humble beginnings to larger and more elegant forms. 4. The decorative French woodwork, such as is found on the mantel, is very rare. The vast majority of woodwork in surviving St. Landry Creole houses is either in the Federal or the Greek Revival style.

Street address: Jct. of US 190 and Academy St. Opelousas, LA USA 70570 County / Borough / Parish: St. Landry Year listed: 1991 Historic (Areas of) Significance: Architecture/Engineering Periods of significance: 1800-1824 Historic function: Domestic. Sub - Single Dwelling Current function: Recreation And Culture. Sub - Museum Primary Web Site: [Web Link] Secondary Website 1: [Web Link] Privately owned?: Not Listed Season start / Season finish: Not listed Hours of operation: Not listed Secondary Website 2: Not listed National Historic Landmark Link: Not listed

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