Louisiana has always had a special flavor. When I go there, I really feel like I’ve traveled to a different country, one that is a whole lot more fun than mine. The music, food, art, accents, resilience, partying attitude … Louisiana’s style stands outside, and its structure and interiors are no exception.

Interior decorator, blogger and contributor Valorie Hart has amassed an exuberant group of photos of amazing homes from the Bayou State in her new book, House Proud: Unique Home Design, Louisiana (Glitterati, 2013). She lets us glimpse into houses that any New Orleans tourist or resident would really like to get inside.

She also offers smart tips for observing and implementing your own unique style at home. Here are a few.

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See past the hodgepodge and rust and be daring. Hart’s classic shotgun house in the Irish Channel neighborhood in New Orleans once served as a home for wayward girls, along with the area terrified her Realtor. But Hart visualized throwing dinner parties with her collected china and combining eclectic pieces to achieve what she dubs the “Frenchy fairly New Orleans vernacular.”

Use flat paint less-than-perfect walls, and paint walls, ceiling and trim the same colour. At a house that shows its era, flat paint aids conceal flaws that glossy paint would highlight.

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Use fabric to cover walls to conceal flaws and unused doors. Hart uses her own home as a design lab, mixing and matching new and old, and high- and – low-end materials. She admits to “using smoke and mirrors,” she says, to achieve a luxe look, such as using the fabric-covered wall in this bedroom.

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Couples should celebrate their differences and undermine. Hart’s Irish Channel neighbors Tom Landry and Shawn Richard were nicely equipped to take on a house in a 100-plus-year-old bread factory building — Landry is an architect, and Richard is a property attorney. However, one is a modernist and a collector while another is a traditionalist and a minimalist.

The couple combined their distinct designs to create interiors that show off both characters. They’ve invested in classic pieces from B&B Italia and Knoll, and they mix in things from thrift shops, flea markets, Ikea and their journeys. The search is the thing that makes each item special, since the hunt or trip itself is special and memorable.

Use pairs of seats to make visual symmetry. This symmetrical furniture arrangement makes it possible for the portrait by David Harouni to glow as the focal point of the seating area.

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This is the Greek revival house of musicians Sean Yseult (White Zombie) and Chris Lee (Super Group) in the New Orleans Garden District.

Collect what you enjoy and make it fairly. An art college alum, Yseult dubs her approach to the 1860 house “early Addams Family.” Her love of contemporary horror TV shows and magic comes in this deep purple dining area.

Use one bit of oversized artwork as an accent wall. This classic horror movie poster stands around the scale of the dining space, brings in riotous colour and sets the tone for all of the entertaining the couple does.

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Make a leasing elegant with white walls and white silk drapes. In their rented late-1800s house in the Uptown area of New Orleans, Ashley Longshore and Michael Smith dressed the walls using dramatic window coverings, which add luxe texture but don’t distract from the couple’s art collection.

Display your own artwork and the art of buddies. Naturally, art hanging on the walls also will help make this place the couple’s own. These two works are by Longshore.

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Envision your current furniture adapted to your home’s style. Lisa Donofrio was carting this daybed from house to house ever since she bought it and stripped it back throughout her medical college residency at Tulane University.

When she and her husband, Brian Valzania, scooped their 1830s Creole cabin in New Orleans’ French two years later, she tickles the Shabby Chic–style white cotton slipcovers the daybed had worn in their Connecticut home and gave it a purple velvet makeover.

Now it brings lavish yet eclectic style to the home’s sunroom, standing up to the scale of the fireplace and the large mirror hanging over it.

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Get creative with yard area. From the Mid-City area of New Orleans, homeowner Lindsay Ross opened the design of a double-shotgun house to make it all her own. Later she and an adjacent neighbor joined their lawns to make what they have dubbed The Tropical Compound. The newly doubled garden is a excellent place for a party and supplies stunning leaves to enjoy inside and outside, resulting in Hart’s take-away tip:

Shop your garden for palm fronds and leaves and display them inside the house. Just one enormous palm frond provides this toilet a tropical-paradise feeling.

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Embrace and display your own quirky collections. Homeowner Miranda Lake uses her artist’s eye to display her ranges in her 1910 Victorian shotgun house in New Orleans’ Mid-City area. It’s a set of special things that she describes as ” almost like a beautiful bouquet of flowers from a different dimension.”

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Blend items that would usually never go together. Lake claims the horns beneath the classic typewriter here are “a reference to the need for journalistic integrity.”

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House Proud, by Valorie Hart – $34

There are several more amazing things to see inside House Proud, such as a double-decker bus-turned-playhouse, a well-placed disco ball, a claw-foot bathtub planter full of toy horses, plus a faux malachite dining room ceiling.

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