- Marble House was completed in 1892 as a summer home for William K. Vanderbilt and Alva Vanderbilt.
- Built with half a million cubic feet of marble, it features 50 rooms and spans 140,000 square feet.
- Scenes from the HBO show “The Gilded Age” were filmed in the historic Rhode Island home.
Alva Vanderbilt’s 39th birthday present from her husband was a 140,000-square-foot summer “cottage” on the shores of Newport, Rhode Island.
As heir to the Vanderbilt family fortune during the Gilded Age, William K. Vanderbilt spared no expense in building Marble House for his wife. It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the same architect who worked on The Breakers, another expansive Newport mansion. Construction cost around $11 million in 1892, or about $380 million in today’s dollars. The home’s 500,000 cubic feet of marble alone cost about $7 million, or around $241 million today.
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The marriage didn’t last, but Marble House remained in her possession after their divorce. In addition to throwing extravagant balls and dinner parties, Alva Vanderbilt also hosted women’s suffrage rallies on the property and leveraged her wealth to champion the cause. She even wrote the libretto for an operetta about women’s suffrage, which was performed at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1915.
In recent years, the HBO show “The Gilded Age” has used Marble House as a film set.
Take a look inside this historic Newport mansion.
