A place for artists to find housing and employment while working on their craft exists as a hotel with a unique business model in the Lower Garden District. The Travelers Hotel, located in a freshly remodeled building at 1476 Magazine Street, is open as a worker-owned, nine-room boutique inn. Up to four rooms are set aside for professional artists to live while working as part-time employees maintaining the hospitality business.

The resident artists work 20 hours per week from which they get a place to live along with income and nearby studio space. Any artist can apply for a position via the hotel’s website, followed by a meeting with the resident artists.

Negotiations for a short-term stay are also possible and artwork can be used as currency in exchange to purchase nights at the hotel.

Travelers Hotel is located at 1476 Magazine Street in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans, photo courtesy of Travelers Hotel.

“We are not technical about how we define artists,” said Chuck Rutledge, who founded the Travelers Hotel with Ann Williams. “We would accept anybody and would not discriminate against someone because they are not a particular type of artist. If they have a passion and want to live creatively this allows them to achieve that balance.”

For Rutledge and Williams, the first concept of their arts-and-hospitality business was born in the Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale, another city known as a popular music destination similar to New Orleans but much smaller.

“What people love is engaging with people in the hotel, people from all over the world are attracted to the Delta for the blues music. We get a lot of people going from Nashville to Memphis to Clarksdale and New Orleans,” said Rutledge.

On one of the walls of the New Orleans location hangs the hood of a car with a painting of a boy sitting on top of another car, oxidized with chemicals and salt water to expedite the rusting process.

This is one of many artworks that decorate the halls by Walker Babington, a resident artist and film actor. His latest film project is a television show, Panic, that premiered on Amazon TV in May.

The hectic nature of New Orleans makes the hotel a perfect place to decompress from the world outside, according to resident writer Hannah Richter. She found the Travelers Hotel through a chance encounter on Facebook, which she said was beautiful and random in the best way. While staying at the hotel, she is working on a book that combines themes of environmentalism in both fiction and non-fiction along with celebration and despair as interchangeable states of being in the modern world.

Considering the housing crisis in New Orleans exacerbated by gentrification, the Travelers Hotel is a welcoming space for struggling artists.

“On a widespread scale, if more businesses were doing what we’re doing, equity would increase ten-fold and I think its applicable across the industry,” said Richter. “You don’t have to be an artist to get that sort of equity, you just need structures that support alternative models of living, when clearly what we have been doing has been pushing a lot of people of out their homes and not bringing them in.

“Hopefully a lot of people will also spend money on local businesses. That should be the point,” she said.

Not only does the Travelers Hotel look to give back to its community, it aims to create one through the communal environment of the accommodations.

Bennington said the owners want the lobby, a comfortable living room space, to be a place where people congregate. They want to inspire guests to engage in conversation and express their own creativity.

This space is envisioned work as room to host concerts, gatherings, neighborhood meetings or exhibitions. “Whoever needs the area, we want to say, ‘Hey! Let’s work out something for the night’ if you want to have a gallery show here for the weekend, or if you want to host a small little concert,” said Richter.

Inspired by the influx of creatives in New Orleans, the residents and owners have opened their doors to whomever desires to stay. “It’s really cool to put your energy and talents towards a project like this,” Barrington said.