If you’re admiring the impressive architecture on New Orleans’ Prytania Street—named for a never-built military school, or prytaneum, in surveyor Barthelemy Lafon’s original plans for the Garden District—take special note of 2504. Behind the iron fence stands a statue of Madame Butterfly; a plaque declares that you’ve arrived at the Opera Guild Home. When Nettie Kinney Seebold died in 1965, she willed her house to the New Orleans Opera Women’s Guild. Today the home is rented out for various functions, including weddings, dinners, film shoots, and luncheons, with proceeds going to support the New Orleans Opera Association. Nettie Seebold made just one stipulation as she gifted her house to the guild—that it not be renovated, nor the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century treasures inside sold. The Opera Guild takes care, too, to share the lives and stories of those who owned the home before.