An exciting thrust of cold atom research is to explore some unique aspects of such systems that have no prior analogue in electronic solids.An emergent topic along this line is the study of cold atoms coherently excited up to the higher orbital bands of optical lattices in recent experiments, motivated in part by early theoretical proposals.In this talk, I will first give an overview of this topic and then report theoretical findings of intriguing effective quantum orbital models and topological phases of matter.For example, interacting fermions on a two-leg ladder of unequal parity orbitals at half filling, which is derived from the experimentally realized double-well lattices by dimension reduction, are found to undergo transition from a topological to a ferro-orbital Mott insulator phase at a critical strength of repulsive interaction.