The Art Of Doing (Almost) Nothing

An itinerant hotel developer makes a home for himself in New Orleans by purchasing a crumbling, nearly 200-year-old Italianate house — and having the good sense to leave it mostly alone.

- Nancy Hass

AS A HOTELIER, Jayson Seidman has spent years shuttling between projects in New York, Louisiana, Texas and California. The footloose pace suited his metabolism and talent for making himself at home anywhere in the world. Seidman, who was born in Mobile, Ala., and raised in Houston, has a confident East Coast polish from a post-college stint in New York City as a Goldman Sachs real-estate analyst. ‘‘No one can quite place me, which I like,’’ he says.

But three years ago, after opening the Drifter, a conversion of a 1950s motel in New Orleans, he decided he might stay put for a while. He had a special affection for the city, where his mother was raised and where he had gone to college, and it was here that he purchased his permanent home: the grandly decaying former residence of James Donald “Don” Didier, a legendary antiques collector and preservationist whose shop once anchored the Magazine Street antiques district.