Sited 20 feet above the banks of the Bayou Teche, the construction of Shadows-on-the-Teche, a two-and-a-half-story, sixteen room house, coincided with the apogee of the Greek Revival style in United States architecture.

The seven bay entrance facade is located on the south front and is made up of eight full-height Tuscan columns of white-plastered brick standing on high square bases, that support a second-floor gallery or veranda, and topped by a Doric frieze.

The loggia is accessed on the ground floor by triple brick archways, where to the left, a narrow staircase leads to the second level with double white columns helping to support the frieze at the top of the house, and enclosed by a banister.

[4] The grounds were laid out by Shadows-on-the-Teche's last private owner, William Weeks Hall, who established gardens formed by boxwood hedges and aspidistra walks, that included live oaks, bamboo, camellias, azaleas, and other plantings.

David and Mary Weeks were wealthy growers of sugar cane; they owned four plantations totaling approximately 3,000 acres (12 km2) of Acadiana land.

Planter David Weeks, who became chronically ill while Shadows-on-the-Teche was being built, died in August 1834 while in traveling in New England seeking medical attention.

Mary Weeks remarried lawyer John Moore but kept her children's property separate from that of her second husband, as she was allowed to do under Louisiana law.

An accomplished artist[8] and strongly preservation-minded individual, Hall sorted and donated the voluminous archive of family papers that he found in the house, and entertained many notable people of the age including Lyle Saxon, Cecil B. DeMille, Emily Post, Walt Disney, and Henry Miller, who recounted his visit to the property in his travelogue The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

[9] At the end of his life in 1958, Hall donated the house and garden to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has owned and operated it to the present.