The Breakers: Newport's Marble Answer to the Gilded Age

Every country with new money eventually builds a house that tries to settle the argument with old money. In America, that house is The Breakers. Completed in 1895 for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, it took the Italian Renaissance palazzo, crossed it with the building technology of the Gilded Age, and set it on the cliffs above Easton Bay in Newport, Rhode Island, where the Atlantic could admire it. More than a century later, it remains the defining statement of an era when American houses stopped apologizing.

It is a palace, but it is a composed one.

The architect was Richard Morris Hunt, the first American to train at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the man who, more than any other, gave the Gilded Age its architectural language. Vanderbilt, the grandson of the Commodore and president of the New York Central Railroad, wanted a house that would express the family's position without vulgarity, which in 1890s Newport meant one thing: a European palace, executed with American resources and without visible effort. Hunt obliged with a design inspired by the sixteenth-century palaces of Genoa and Turin, rendered in Indiana limestone and settled into thirteen acres of cliff-top grounds.

The numbers still impress. Seventy rooms across five floors, some 138,000 square feet of gross floor area, and a Great Hall that measures fifty feet in every direction: fifty wide, fifty deep, fifty high. The interiors were decorated by Jules Allard and Sons of Paris, with Ogden Codman Jr. contributing to the design, and the relief sculpture is by Karl Bitter. Hunt specified steel framing and concealed modern services behind the Renaissance dress; the house was as technologically advanced as it was historically literate.

A house that replaced a house

The Breakers that stands today is the second house of the name on the site. Vanderbilt bought an earlier wooden mansion, designed by Peabody and Stearns for Pierre Lorillard IV, in 1885. That house burned in 1892, and Vanderbilt commissioned Hunt to replace it in a material that would not burn. The result is sometimes read as a rebuke to the shingle-style informality of the earlier Newport cottages. It was, more precisely, a declaration that the Vanderbilts intended to build for permanence.

The house was a summer house, occupied for roughly six weeks a year, which tells you something about the economy of the Gilded Age: a 70-room marble palazzo, staffed year-round, used for a month and a half. The Vanderbilts entertained on a scale that matched the architecture. But the house was also a family home in the seasons it was used, and the Preservation Society's presentation keeps that duality visible: the state rooms are ceremonial, but the upper floors and service areas explain how the ceremony was produced.

The interiors as a French workshop

The decoration deserves the attention the architecture gets. Jules Allard and Sons, the Paris firm, supplied the carved woodwork, the gilding, and the period rooms-within-rooms that give the interiors their authority; Ogden Codman Jr., the Boston decorator who would later co-write The Decoration of Houses with Edith Wharton, contributed to the design; Karl Bitter, the great architectural sculptor of the age, carved the reliefs. This was the standard Gilded Age production system at its highest level: French craftsmanship, American money, and an architect capable of holding the whole thing together.

Walk the enfilade today and notice how Hunt handles the light. The Great Hall, fifty feet cubed, is top-lit and cool; the Morning Room and the Music Room face the sea; the loggia opens the piano nobile to the Atlantic air. For all its marble, the house is comfortable in the way only a brilliantly planned house can be. The technology helped: steel framing, electric light, and modern plumbing are all concealed within the Renaissance envelope, the nineteenth century's building science wearing the sixteenth century's clothes.

Preservation as a public act

The Breakers became a museum through one of the more graceful acts in American preservation. Countess Szechenyi, Vanderbilt's daughter, leased the house to the Preservation Society of Newport County in 1948 for a dollar a year; the Society purchased it from the Vanderbilt heirs in 1972 and has operated it as a historic house museum ever since. It is open to the public year-round, a rarity among great houses, and admission is by timed ticket with advance purchase recommended.

The Society has continued to deepen the interpretation. Specialty tours take visitors beneath the house into the service areas, and a preservation-in-progress tour of the third floor shows conservation as a living practice rather than a finished result. Across the Newport Mansions properties, adult admission ranges from 25 to 57 US dollars depending on the ticket, with reduced pricing for young visitors. The Breakers-only figure varies by season; check the official site for current details.

What distinguishes The Breakers from its many imitators is Hunt's control. The plan is lucid, the procession from the porte-cochere through the Great Hall to the loggia and the sea is beautifully judged, and the detailing never quite tips into the overstatement the style invites. It is a palace, but it is a composed one. American architecture learned a great deal from this house, not least that monumentality and livability are not opposites when the architect knows the difference.

Visiting

The Breakers anchors any serious tour of Newport's Gilded Age mansions, and it pairs naturally with Hunt's earlier Marble House nearby. Book a timed ticket in advance, take the Beneath The Breakers tour for the service-side story, and walk the Cliff Walk afterwards: the house is best understood from the water side, with the Atlantic doing what Hunt knew it would do. The Preservation Society operates several Newport mansions on a single ticketing system, so a multi-house ticket is the economical choice.