École Bilingue de la Nouvelle-Orléans has purchased the longtime corporate headquarters of jewelry brand Mignon Faget at the corner of Magazine and Gen. Pershing streets, paying $1.65 million for the nearly century-old former bank building. The French immersion school finalized the deal on August 12, according to city property records, adding another parcel to its expanding Uptown campus footprint.
The sale, first reported by NOLA.com, works out to roughly $241.02 per square foot, according to commercial real estate tracking from ELIFIN. École Bilingue's head of school, Pierre-Loïc Denichou, said no immediate changes are planned for the property, though he noted the building offered an opportunity for potential expansion as the school continues a campus master-planning process. He declined to say whether Mignon Faget will lease back the office space or relocate entirely.
A Bank Building Turned Jewelry Headquarters
The building at 4300 Magazine Street dates to the 1920s, when it was constructed to house a branch of Hibernia National Bank, according to historical background from the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. Mignon Faget purchased the building shortly before 1997 and moved its corporate offices into the former bank branch in the late 1990s, where they have remained ever since.
Before that, the brand operated out of a building on Dublin Street in the Riverbend for more than 25 years, with a studio on the second floor and a retail outlet on the ground floor. Mignon Faget, the designer, founded the company in 1969 and built a reputation for jewelry and other works inspired by local plants, architecture and cultural touchstones. She is now in her early 90s, and turned over company leadership to Maghan Oroszi in 2024. Oroszi, an architect, sculptor and designer who joined the company in 2010, said there are no updates yet about where the retail store's location will ultimately land.
Retail Building Also Changing Hands
Separate from the headquarters sale, Mignon Faget's flagship retail store already moved to a leased building in the 3800 block of Magazine Street. The building it left behind, at Penniston and Magazine streets, is also being sold. Adam Marcus, a local investor who owned that retail building for nearly 30 years, said the buyer is a local investor group, though he declined to identify them and said he does not know what they have planned for the site. Marcus emphasized that the retail building's pending sale is unrelated to the headquarters transaction.
A Decade of Growing Enrollment
École Bilingue, founded in 1998, is a private French immersion school that has more than doubled its enrollment over the past decade and now serves 450 students in grades pre-K through 8. Its campus sits just off Magazine Street in a former St. Henry's Catholic Church and school complex; the school closed in the early 1970s, while the church itself closed shortly after Hurricane Katrina. The school previously secured City Planning Commission approval to adapt those former church buildings on Constance Street for middle school use, part of a long-term pattern of acquiring adjacent neighborhood properties as it grows.
École Bilingue is one of five New Orleans schools offering programs taught almost entirely in French, and it is the only private, independent option among them — the rest operate as tuition-free public charter programs, according to the French Immersion Schools Directory. The school follows a French curriculum meeting both French and Louisiana state standards, and it is accredited by France's AEFE agency as well as the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest, per the école's own materials. Tuition for the 2026–2027 school year ranges from $15,750 to $20,500 depending on grade level, serving students as young as 18 months.
The school's public profile in the neighborhood extends beyond academics. École Bilingue annually hosts Fête Française, billed as the largest French festival in New Orleans, drawing crowds to its Uptown campus for food, art and music celebrating Francophone heritage, according to New Orleans Mom. Hoodline previously highlighted the free festival for keeping that cultural tradition alive on Magazine Street.
For now, both the future of Mignon Faget's corporate offices and the buyer behind the retail building sale remain unresolved. Neither Denichou nor Marcus offered further detail on those open questions, leaving two Uptown Magazine Street properties in a period of transition even as École Bilingue moves forward with its long-term campus planning.
