The Insider’s Guide to Exploring Newport’s Gilded Age Mansions

The art of summering was perfected by the Gilded Age tycoons who built lavish summer cottages along Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island. The term cottage is rather deceiving; in the same manner in which “camps” was used to describe sprawling timber estates in the Adirondacks, the cottages in question often featured enough bedrooms to house a staff and household of hundreds. 

These Bellevue mansions—several of which were built to resemble Versailles—run entirely counter to the old-money aesthetic, despite their history. Instead of quiet luxury, they scream out over the tree-lined boulevards of Bellevue Avenue and across the Atlantic, their thunderous wealth announcing the prestige of their onetime owners. 

During the Gilded Age, to spend a season in Newport was an act of competitive social climbing and party-throwing. A ballroom was as mandatory as an outhouse, and gala themes ranged from the decadent (like the Mother Goose Ball, where guests dressed as creatures from fairy tales) to the delightfully absurd (a Dogs’ Dinner, where canines wore diamond collars and dined on a fricassee of bones). If these walls could talk, they’d speak of murders and love affairs, excess and decay, and the lush interiors still serve as a portal into Newport, then and now. The opulent estates have also appeared on the silver screen: Rosecliff served as the backdrop for Tracy Samantha Lord’s (played by Grace Kelly) waterfront estate in High Society (1956), and Robert Redford’s Jay Gatsby danced with Mia Farrow’s Daisy Buchanan in the Gold Ballroom of Marble House in The Great Gatsby (1974).

These homes have been immortalized in the writing of Henry James and Dominick Dunne; the latter’s final novel, Too Much Money, features a fictionalized account of the notorious attempted murder involving Claus von Bülow and his heiress wife, Martha Sharp “Sunny” von Bülow, at their Bellevue estate, Clarendon Court. More recently, HBO’s The Gilded Age has brought these homes back into the spotlight. Created by Julian Fellowes, the upstairs-downstairs period drama has caused tourism in Newport to skyrocket to record-breaking numbers. The estates featured on the show have capitalized on their success, with guided Inside the Gilded Age tours and on-site displays in rooms where certain scenes were filmed. 

Today, visitors to Newport don’t need a hand-delivered invitation to step within the hallowed walls of these storied mansions, as many of the buildings have been preserved and converted into museums. For the purposes of this list, we will be focusing on estates accessible to the public, which excludes Beechwood, the storied estate of high-society gatekeeper Caroline Astor. Today, that mansion belongs to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who purchased it for $10.5 million in 2010 and then spent over $100 million more on renovations, and is reportedly transforming the first floor into a private museum for his 19th-century art collection. Down the road, another mansion, Miramar, was sold to Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman for $27 million in 2021—he has pledged to turn the estate into a museum after his wife’s death. From old-money tycoons to tech billionaires, the times they are a-changin’. 

These totems of American decadence can always be viewed from the Cliff Walk, a waterfront path winding along the edges of their manicured lawns, though you’re only getting half the story when seeing these properties from the outside, no matter how magnificent the exterior. From the over-the-top glamour of The Breakers and Marble House to the manicured grounds of The Elms and Rosecliff, read on for an insider’s guide to the Newport mansions.