North Shore to Gulf Coast: Covington, Bay St. Louis & Ocean Springs

Coffee Science on Lee Lane in downtown Covington is the social and cultural anchor of the North Shore food scene — single-origin espresso, seasonal pour-overs, and house-baked pastries in a bright Victorian storefront. The surrounding Lee Lane shops include independent art galleries, antique dealers specializing in Louisiana Creole furniture and folk art, and a garden boutique that feels entirely of its North Shore environment.

The Old Mandeville lakefront seawall is a half-mile promenade shaded by live oaks, lined with Victorian cottages, and bordered by the open water of Lake Pontchartrain to the south. Pontchartrain Vineyards nearby offers afternoon wine tastings — muscadine reds, fruit wines, and hybrid varietals grown in the North Shore's sandy soil. The combination of lakeshore walking and a quiet winery afternoon is exactly the pace this region invites.

The premier North Shore dinner destination on Lake Pontchartrain's waterfront — chargrilled oysters, crab-stuffed flounder, and the regional specialty of barbecue shrimp over stone-ground grits, with lake views from the dining room and a well-stocked Louisiana wine list.

Old Town Bay St. Louis is the most walkable and charming town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast — a compact neighborhood of Victorian cottages, Creole bungalows, and restored storefronts on Beach Boulevard and Second Street, filled with independent art galleries, artisan studios, and the kind of small-business culture that took root here after Hurricane Katrina (2005) forced a reinvention of the local economy. The Saturday farmers market on the beach and the permanent gallery row make this one of the South's most accessible small-town art destinations.

Use the afternoon to explore a different side of Old Town Bay St. Louis — Beach Boulevard Gallery Walk — there's more to discover beyond the morning highlights.

The Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs preserves and displays the life's work of Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965), one of the most extraordinary American artists of the 20th century — a naturalist-muralist who spent decades making solo kayak voyages to Horn Island in the Gulf Islands National Seashore, living alone among the birds, fish, and weather of the barrier island and filling thousands of logbooks and watercolors with what he witnessed. Anderson suffered from mental illness and kept his most ambitious work hidden — after his death, family members opened a locked room in his cottage and discovered the walls covered floor-to-ceiling with a vast mural depicting the natural history of the Gulf Coast, painted in secret. The museum displays his watercolors, linocuts, and pottery alongside the legendary Community Center murals he painted on the walls of Ocean Springs' community building in 1951 — an overwhelming, joyful, and deeply strange body of work that places Anderson among the great American visionaries.

Shearwater Pottery was founded by Walter Anderson's brother Peter Anderson in 1928 on the family's Oak Keepers Hill estate in Ocean Springs — and it is still operated by the Anderson family nearly a century later, making it one of the longest-continuously-operating art potteries in America. The studio and showroom on Shearwater Drive, among live oaks on a bluff above the Back Bay of Biloxi, sell hand-thrown pottery in the family's distinctive naturalist aesthetic: birds, fish, and bayou animals rendered in glazes of blue-green, cream, and ochre. The walking tour of the grounds passes through a natural landscape Anderson-maintained for nearly 100 years.

Ocean Springs's Government Street downtown has one of the highest concentrations of working art studios and galleries on the Gulf Coast — ceramic artists in the Shearwater tradition, painters inspired by Walter Anderson's naturalist legacy, and jewelers and woodworkers whose work reflects the surrounding Gulf landscape. The first Saturday Art Walk each month draws crowds; the town's walkable scale and abundant live oak shade make any day a pleasant afternoon gallery browse.