Step behind the curtain of some of America’s largest and most lavish stately homes and discover their secrets through the ages. From Hollywood movie stars at the Biltmore Estate to Suffragette rallies at Marble House, these unique moments in history will cast these storied homes in a whole new light.

Click or scroll to step back in time with these 21 images from the archives…

Pictured here in all its floral, frilled glory is the drawing room of author Edith Wharton’s childhood home at West 25th Street in New York City. The aggressively patterned fabrics, which adorn both the walls and furnishings, paired with a profusion of mirrors, gilded cabinets and crystal chandeliers, represent the height of Gilded Age interiors.

However, they differed starkly from Wharton’s own design preferences, which she outlined in her little-known first full-length publication, an interior design treatise entitled The Decoration of Houses.

Photographs below stairs in American stately homes are scarce, and those depicting the legions of domestic staff who kept these great houses running are even more so.

In this rare image from 1891, we can see the old kitchens of the White House, arguably the most famous ‘stately home’ in America, as well as President Harrison's cook, Dolly Johnson. The White House servants would have both lived and worked in the damp and mouldy ground floor of the house.

Edith Wharton was finally able to put her own sophisticated architectural tastes into practice in 1901 with the construction of The Mount, her country residence in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Wharton designed The Mount herself, collaborating with architects Ogden Codman Jr. and Francis L.V. Hoppin. She modelled it after Belton House, a 17th-century English country manor.

While she lived there for 10 years, the home was both her triumph and her sanctuary, where she penned some of her most celebrated works, including The House of Mirth.

Another lesser-known but magnificent relic of the Gilded Age, the Anderson Mansion in Washington, DC, is a Beaux Arts masterpiece constructed for American diplomat Larz Anderson and his wife, Isabel, in 1905.

The Andersons spared no expense when decorating the home, which they used to host diplomatic receptions, formal dinners, luncheons and concerts until 1937. The home’s ballroom, pictured here, would have been a key entertaining venue for the political pair.

This snap from August 1914 depicts a ‘lawn fête and tableaux for the Red Cross Fund’ given by Newport society at The Breakers during the First World War.

The estate's lush grounds would have made the perfect setting for any sort of outdoor gathering, and the society matrons pictured here certainly had gotten into the spirit of the thing! Plus, as most of New York's elite decamped for Newport during the summer season, it would have been easy to drum up an excellent guest list.

This photo from 1914 depicts the wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt, Alva, as well as the Duchess of Marlborough, Mrs O.H.P. Belmont and Barbara Vanderbilt on the steps of the Chinese tea house at Marble House.

Alva commissioned the building in 1913 from architects Richard and Joseph Howland Hunt. The clifftop retreat was inspired by the tea houses of the Song dynasty, which ruled China from 960 to 1279.

Alva Vanderbilt’s Marble House was the most opulent of the family's infamous Newport 'summer cottages'. The architectural triumph cost $11 million (£8.3m) to build, the equivalent of $386.6 million (£292m) in today’s money.

While the home was initially designed to impress New York’s elite society, in her later life, Alva took up the cause of the Suffragette movement, and the home became a useful base for holding meetings and rallies, like the one pictured here in 1919.

Said to be the most expensive house ever built in Pennsylvania, Whitemarsh Hall was completed in 1921 for Edward Townsend Stotesbury and his second wife, Eva Roberts.

The pinnacle of Gilded Age construction and arguably one of the best examples of grand Palladian architecture in the United States, Whitemarsh is the third largest house ever built in the country, with 147 rooms and over 100,000 square feet (9,290sqm) of living space.

The French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, declared Whitemarsh to be America's answer to the Palace of Versailles, and given its lavish decoration and opulent features such as this dramatic organ, it’s not hard to see why.

Tragically, the house was demolished in 1980, a move which is considered to be one of the greatest losses ever sustained to American architectural history, and which makes photographs like these all the more rare and valuable.

In another elusive snap from the Whitemarsh mansion, we can see the no-expense-spared bathroom, laden with marble and boasting state-of-the-art plumbing for the 1920s.

The mansion had cost an estimated $10 million (£7.7m) to build ($179m/£135m in today's money). It included other ostentatious features, including an indoor fountain, a movie theatre, a gymnasium, a barber shop, a tailor's, a refrigerating plant, a bakery, a cookie room (yes, you read that correctly!) and a wine cellar in direct defiance of prohibition.

Formerly a spectacular Gilded Age mansion owned by Baltimore’s Garrett family, this magnificent home was originally built in 1858. However, it was expanded multiple times to accommodate the Garretts' ever-growing collections of rare manuscripts, decorative arts and antiques.

Pictured here is a unique fixture of the home – a private theatre designed by iconic Russian stage and costume designer Léon Bakst, which boasts dramatic exposed wooden ceiling beams, many of which are inlaid with mosaics. A lavishly patterned curtain on the stage and bookshelf-lined walls complete the space.

This spectacular southern mansion, known as Swan House, was designed for Edward Inman, an Atlanta businessman with an inherited cotton fortune, and his wife Emily in 1928.

The home was designed by noted architect Philip Trammell Shutze to combine English and Italian classical styles. The result is a fascinating blend of the two architectural schools, overlaying a heavy influence from more traditional southern plantation or Antebellum styles.

This severely gothic-looking bedroom belongs to a sprawling mansion in San Jose, California, which was originally purchased by heiress Sarah Winchester as an eight-room farmhouse in 1886, which she would go on to expand until her death in 1922.

However, even then, the 160-room mansion – known today as the Winchester Mystery House – remained incomplete, and was indeed intended to be so.

Sarah was plagued by a troubled past and her father's legacy as the inventor of the Winchester rifle, which had claimed so many lives. She designed the home to be full of secret rooms, hidden passages and staircases to nowhere, like the one pictured here, to confuse any vengeful ghosts she feared might be looking for her.

North Carolina’s Biltmore Estate is yet another iconic Vanderbilt property, built in the French châteauesque style by George W. Vanderbilt in 1895. The magnificent property remains America’s largest privately owned house, and is pictured here as the backdrop to a 1956 snap of British actor Alec Guinness captured during shooting for The Swan, which was filmed at the estate.

The Vanderbilt's Marble House was opened to the public in 1957 with the Tiffany Ball, a fundraiser for the Preservation Society of Newport County to restore some of the city’s historic buildings.

The best and brightest of Newport society gathered for the event, with some 1,200 guests gathering for an evening of dancing. Though no longer a private home, the house still served the purpose for which it was built, to host on a lavish scale.

This elegant stately home in New York’s Long Island is known as Old Westbury Gardens, and was completed in 1906 for prominent local lawyer John S. Phipps, his wife Margarita Grace Phipps and their four children.

The Charles II-style mansion was designed by English architect George A. Crawley and sits nestled in 200 acres (81ha) of formal gardens, landscaped grounds, woodlands, ponds and lakes. Pictured here is Phipps’s study, which is illustrative of the rest of the house in terms of its opulence and expense.

Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Old Westbury Gardens boasts countless period details including parquet floors, ornately moulded ceilings and decorative filigree and wall panelling. It is also stuffed to the gills with fine English antiques and decorative arts from the family’s more than fifty years of residence. Indeed, the entire home is designed to resemble a stately home in England.

Known as Fair Lane, the family estate owned by Clara and Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, is a sprawling limestone mansion set upon 1,300 private acres (526ha) along the River Rouge.

The couple moved into the newly constructed 56-room mansion in 1916, and in 1957, the house was donated to the University of Michigan, which opened it to the public as a museum. A young woman can be seen here in 1961, exploring the sheer size and grandeur of one of the home’s ornate fireplaces.

The same woman can also be found in this image, relaxing in the middle of the dining room floor to better admire the crystal chandelier and ornately moulded ceiling.

The home was initially designed in the Prairie House style, but its plans were later revised after Henry and Clara took a trip to Europe and became enamoured instead with more traditional English manor house architecture and decorating.

Another famous Vanderbilt property and one of the Newport summer cottages, The Breakers was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II between 1893 and 1895.

The estate was built on an epic scale with lavish furnishings, and even after it had passed largely out of the hands of the Vanderbilt family was still used for hosting spectacular events, as was its original intent. Jackie Kennedy is pictured here at a banquet held for the 1962 America’s Cup race.

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