Behind its impressive façade, this spectacular marble residence in Newport, Rhode Island is so much more than a house. An architectural showpiece and – above all – a statement of wealth and power for the Vanderbilt family, it is one of the most elaborate of the Gilded Age summer 'cottages' in this playground of the super-rich.

Costing the modern equivalent of $384 million (£303m) to build, the story behind Marble House is rife with historical intrigue, 19th-century opulence and naked social ambition.

Click or scroll to tour this stunning stone palace with a fascinating tale to tell…

The Vanderbilts are one of the wealthiest families in American history. Beginning with businessman 'the Commodore' Cornelius Vanderbilt (pictured) the family firm began with running a passenger boat to Staten Island.

Cornelius expanded into steamboats before establishing the New York Central Railroad. It is estimated that Cornelius alone reportedly amassed a fortune of $100 million (£79m), which would be about $3 billion (or £2.4bn) today. 

It's no surprise then that his family went on to be one of the richest, building and buying properties across the United States.

The third generation of the prominent Vanderbilt family, William Kissam inherited a fortune of $55 million (£44m) when his father died – equivalent to roughly $2 billion (£1.58bn) in today’s money – along with the co-management of the family railroad holdings.

However, far less interested in the business than his father, grandfather and brother, William K’s passions turned instead towards the operation of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, art collecting and yacht racing.

He also had a certain predilection for expensive homes...

In 1875, William married Alva Erskine Smith (pictured) of Mobile, Alabama and the pair settled in New York City.

Despite being some of the wealthiest people in the world at the time, Alva and William were considered ‘new money’. They were consistently denied an invitation to the upper echelons of New York society, the famous 400, by society matron Mrs Caroline Astor.

In a bid to gain entry into this exclusive social circle, the Vanderbilts commissioned society architect Richard Morris Hunt to build them a $3 million (£2.4m) mansion on the fashionable 5th Avenue, a move which finally ended Mrs Astor’s resistance. The house would have cost roughly $104 million (£82m) today.

However, the Vanderbilts, Alva in particular, were eager to push their success one step further. As a 39th birthday present for his wife, William commissioned Hunt to build a veritable palace in Newport, where the most fashionable New York families ‘summered’.

The house was reported in the contemporary press to have cost $11 million to build, around $384 million (£303m) in today’s money – $7 million of that was spent on 500,00 cubic feet (17.7 cubic metres) of marble, equivalent to $244 million (£193m) when adjusted for inflation.

The opulent property was completed between 1888 and 1892 and aptly christened ‘Marble House’.

Given complete control over the project from its architectural conception to its artistic execution, it became such a labour of love that Alva would describe the mansion in her memoirs as being "like a fourth child to me".

Here is the completed house in 1890, set back from the road with a grand front entrance and driveway. It was no less grand inside thanks to Alva's vision.

Alva undertook the design and decoration of the 50-room mansion herself, working closely with architect Hunt and the French interior designer Jules Allard.

She poured so much money into the importing of expensive materials and luxurious furnishings that when she was finished, the house was considered the most lavish home in America.

Let's take a tour of its incredible interiors...

The home’s spectacular entryway is lined in Italian marble, which Alva selected for its unique colour. She thought a white marble would have been too stark and clinical for the interior of a home, so opted instead for the warm golden brown shade pictured here.

The entryway is dominated by a spectacular marble staircase designed by Jules Allard, the French designer contracted to assist Hunt with the home’s interiors.

The ornate wrought iron railing was designed and built in Allard’s workshop in France before being shipped to Newport.

If you look closely at the foot of one of the cherubs at its base, you can see that Allard signed his name on the impressive piece of craftsmanship.

At the top of the staircase on the mezzanine level are two sets of glass doors behind which you’ll find two cloakrooms for party guests: a red room with horses for gentlemen and a white room with a powder blue ceiling for ladies. Guests could freshen up after travel before an event.

Marble House is, of course, characterised by its use of many types of marble in a wide variety of colours. The dining room features a particularly distinctive rose-coloured marble imported from Algeria which lines the walls, seen here.

The marble was used to panel the walls of the dining room in a technique called book-matching, where a slab of marble is split open to create two slabs whose grains are the perfect mirror image of each other.

This technique was considered a sign of expert craftsmanship, as well as exorbitant expense.

The pink marble was accented by a dining set of scarlet chairs inspired by those owned by King Louis XIV. Each weighed 75 pounds (34kg), with the two armchairs at either end weighing 100 pounds (45kg). The chairs feature gilded bronze bases and cut velvet upholstery embroidered with gold thread for a truly royal finish.

In another nod to European tradition, the dining room is bookended by two stag’s heads, through which the Vanderbilts were attempting to evoke the atmosphere of grand banqueting hall after a hunt.

Alva considered herself and her family to be on par with European royalty and she wanted Marble House to act as testimony to this fact.

She consequently fashioned herself as a patron of the arts, purchasing an entire collection of some 300 pieces of Medieval and Renaissance art belonging to the famous collector Emile Gavet on a trip to Paris.

In need of an appropriate venue to display these artefacts, Alva designed the Gothic Room for Marble House to serve as her private museum.

The Gothic Room had scarlet wall panelling, a carved stone mantlepiece and stained-glass windows, all imported from Europe at tremendous expense and reassembled piece by piece in Newport. 

The room served as the perfect backdrop for the collection and frequently drew students of art history who came to study it.

The true masterpiece of the room, however, is the ornately ribbed stone ceiling reminiscent of a Gothic cathedral.

Seen here decorated for Christmas, The Gothic Room represents more than just the Vanderbilt’s coveting of European aristocratic culture. They desired tangible ties with European aristocracy.

So appropriately in this room, Alva and William's eldest daughter Consuelo (reluctantly) accepted the marriage proposal of the Duke of Marlborough at her parents’ urging.

Like many wealthy American families of the era in search of elevated social status, the Vanderbilts were eager to auction off their wealthy daughters to English nobles in need of extra funds, a phenomenon which created a class of heiresses known as ‘Dollar Princesses'.

The opulent chamber pictured here was known as the grand salon. Coated wall to wall in glittering 22-karat gold leaf, the room is the epitome of the Gilded Age, designed to give guests an immediate impression of elegance, glamour and wealth.

This effect would have been emphasised by the installation of electric lighting in the chandeliers, an almost unheard-of novelty in the late 19th century.

While the rest of Newport relied on gas lamps after nightfall, Marble House would have been ablaze with golden light.

On the upper floors, this fairytale-worthy bedroom was Alva’s pride and joy. It was her private oasis where she could escape the responsibilities of running her household, raising her family and planning her extravagant events.

The room is a flounced and ruffled fantasia of lilac, featuring classical iconography such as nymphs and cherubs and festooned in dense swathes of satin brocade.

Her throne-like canopied bed sits on a raised platform overlooking the Louis XIV-style furniture. As was customary for the time, this room was Alva’s alone, with William residing in his private bedroom in a separate part of the house.

Hanging above the room is a spectacular fresco depicting the goddess Minerva by 18th-century Venetian artist Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, dating to roughly 1721.

It is flanked by four small panels representing mathematics, astronomy, lyric poetry and literature, which serve as clues to its origins in the library of the Palazzo Pisani in Venice.

Much like the Gavet Gothic collection, Alva discovered the fresco on a trip to Paris. It had already been removed from its original location to be sold. The painting was cut into strips and rolled onto cylinders to be transported to Newport, where they were glued to her bedroom ceiling.

While it may more closely resemble the bedchamber of a Medieval monarch, this room was the childhood bedroom of Consuelo Vanderbilt, the first daughter of the family and the future Duchess of Marlborough.

Alva designed the room for Consuelo herself, refusing to allow her daughter’s tastes, or even her possessions, to infiltrate the space.

In her memoirs, Consuelo described the room as ‘austere', and recounted her belief that her mother looked on her as a work of art she was attempting to finish. Given the appearance of her childhood bedroom, it seems pretty apparent that Alva was trying to prepare her daughter for a life of royalty.

Below stairs, a legion of servants kept Marble House running smoothly, washing linen, cooking meals, polishing silver and cleaning furniture.

Many of the men and women who comprised the household staff were immigrants as Marble House was completed the same year as the immigration centre at Ellis Island. However, Alva hired a famous French chef at an astronomical salary to oversee the home’s cuisine.

While the servants’ life was hard, Vanderbilt staff benefitted from the best in modern technology to make everyday tasks easier, including a Pittsburgh automatic instantaneous water heater, enormous gas stove and private ice storage and delivery.

Marble House has six bathrooms and seven bedrooms on its second storey, which included the two Vanderbilt bedrooms, the children’s rooms, the nanny’s room and two guest rooms.

There were also two sizeable dressing rooms for Alva and Consuelo, which today have been remodelled into a yachting trophy room (pictured) for Harold Vanderbilt, Alva and William’s youngest son.

However, the dressing rooms weren’t the only parts of Marble House being used for storage after 1895, when Alva did something unprecedented for a lady of her time or social position: she filed for divorce.

After 20 years of marriage strained by social pressures and financial obligations, Alva finally divorced William in 1895. She saw herself as a pioneer among women of her social circle, to whom she hoped to prove that they were not trapped in their marriages.

She chose William’s close friend Oliver Belmont for her new husband and moved just down the street to his Newport residence of Belcourt.

From this point on, Marble House became little more than a glorified storage unit, useful for keeping linens and out-of-season wardrobes.

The one thing Alva did continue to use consistently on the property was the laundry; apparently, it worked better than the one at Belcourt!

Though Oliver was, by all accounts, the love of Alva’s life, the couple tragically only enjoyed twelve years together before he passed away at the age of just 49.

After Oliver’s death, Alva became deeply interested in the cause of women’s suffrage, returning to Marble House and refashioning it as a destination for rallies and meetings, allowing the likes of militant feminist Alice Paul and her associates the run of her home.

In 1921, she was elected President of the National Woman’s Party, a position which she retained until her death in 1933.

In 1913,  Alva had a Chinese tea house built on Marble House’s sprawling grounds, inspired by those of the Song dynasty who ruled China from 960 to 1279.

The cliffside retreat was built by Richard Howland Hunt and Joseph Howland Hunt, the sons of her beloved Richard Morris who had passed away the year of her divorce. But its true purpose was anything but tea-related...

Alva had envisioned the tea house as a meeting place for women’s suffrage gatherings, even going so far as to permit the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage to use Marble House as headquarters for a period.

She designed its interiors to celebrate the cause while remaining true to the architectural theme of the project, decorating the tea house walls with calligraphed yellow pennants proclaiming ancient Chinese proverbs including: "A woman of strong character is said to be a hero among women. Women with pretty faces and fascinating manners really may overthrow cities."

In 1932, one year before her death, Alva finally sold her beloved Marble House for $1 million, or roughly $23 million (£18m) today, along with its contents for an additional $99,999 (£79k) to the Bostonian financier and stockbroker Frederick H. Prince.

A keen sportsman and yacht racer, Prince and his family continued the tradition of summering at Marble House until he died in 1953, whereupon his son Frederick Prince Jr. inherited the estate.

It was Prince Jr. who opted to open Marble House up for its first public event. The Tiffany Ball in 1957 (pictured here), served as a fundraiser for the Preservation Society of Newport County to restore some of the city’s historic buildings.

In 1963, after the death of the younger Mr Prince, Marble House returned briefly to the Vanderbilt family when it was purchased by Alva and William’s youngest son, Harold, who then donated the home and its furnishings to the Preservation Society of Newport County.

The home was opened to the public as a museum one year later and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

Since opening to the public, Marble House has also been immortalised on the silver screen, featuring in several hit films including The Great Gatsby (1974), True Lies and 27 Dresses.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Marble House is that it was never intended for full-time use.

Built to serve as a summer ‘cottage’, however incongruous the name, the home was only ever inhabited by the Vanderbilts for about six weeks out of the year.

Yet Alva built Marble House to be admired for more than just its physical beauty and, thanks to her pioneering work, it became so much more than a summer residence.

For a woman who clawed her way to the pinnacle of society, Marble House was a trophy which proved her preeminent wealth, taste and power in a world where women had few outlets for demonstrating such achievements.

However, Alva did live to see her talents recognised. In addition to her role as a leader of the Women’s Suffrage movement, she became one of the first women ever elected to the American Institute of Architects, continuing these pursuits for the rest of her life.

Today, Alva’s first foray into the world of architecture and interior design remains open to the public year-round, a testament to one family’s incomparable wealth, and one woman’s indefatigable ambition.

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