After a series of thriving careers in sports marketing for the Saints, real estate development on the West Coast, and VIP management for Burt Reynolds Theater in Jupiter, Florida, Sandra Port moved home to her native New Orleans three years ago. Sandy, as she prefers to be called, moved home to her native New Orleans where she was able to return to her ‘creative self’ and resumed her deep rooted passion for her artistry reflected in her one-of-a-kind Sandarella Glass Purse designs.
“If there’s a parade,” Port said, “there’s a guaranteed party.”
Last year, she made good on a lifelong ambition.
“When I first moved back, I told my granddaughter I would one day have a place in the Quarter,” said Port, 75. “Last April, I was having cocktails at Tableaux (the Jackson Square restaurant) with friends after an opening at M.S. Rau (antiques). I was in my element. I did not want to go back Uptown to be ‘at home.’ I knew the time had come. I had manifested my goal by telling it to my granddaughter. Now it was time to make it a reality.”
Port toured the one-room, 400-square-foot, first-floor condominium on an elegant Royal Street block and knew right away it was the one.
“The gas lantern on the building across the street stays lit both day and night,” she said. “The view through the front window epitomizes to me what the old French Quarter is about. The only thing I did before moving in was replace a few bricks in the living room wall,” she said.
“This is a great party house, whether I have a small group or 30 people. I just open the doors onto Royal Street to accommodate the crowd. It’s perfect. I love it.”
With the budget blown on acquiring her pied-à-terre, furnishing it would be done on a shoestring. Multiple nails in one of the room’s masonry walls called for multiple pieces of art to hide them. A framed black-and-white picture of the 13-year-old Port with her parents, taken in the courtyard at Pat O’Brien’s, keeps time with a fine watercolor of the Carousel Lounge at the nearby Monteleone Hotel that her cousin gifted to her.
“Everything else on the wall, well, really, pretty much everything in here — except the sofa sleeper I bought from the previous owners who left behind a beautiful palette for me to work with — was either a friend’s cast-off or something I picked up at the Red, White, and Blue Thrift Store, The Salvation Army, or Goodwill for a few bucks. Nothing matches,” she said. “I guess you would call the style ‘bohemian.’”
In Port’s chic, colorful world, any occasion at all is worthy of a celebration, preferably one involving either an evening gown, a costume or a combination of both. To accessorize her many looks, Port turned to her hometown, her muse, for inspiration.
Her newly minted business, Sandarella Purses, lands Port sporting a pair of goggles with a glass grinder and a drill in hand.
