Inside Marble House, a Gilded Age Vanderbilt Mansion

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 comprises 50 rooms and spans 140,000 square feet.
Scenes from the HBO series “The Gilded Age” were filmed in this historic Rhode Island home.

Alva Vanderbilt’s 39th birthday present from her husband was a 140,000-square-foot summer “cottage” on the waterfront of Newport, Rhode Island.

As heir to the Vanderbilt family fortune during the Gilded Age, William K. Vanderbilt spared no expense in building the Marble House for his wife. It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the same architect who worked on The Breakers, another sprawling Newport mansion. It cost about $11 million to build in 1892, or about $380 million in today’s dollars. The house’s 500,000 cubic feet of marble alone cost about $7 million, or about $241 million in today’s dollars.

The marriage did not last, but the Marble House remained in her possession after their divorce. In addition to hosting extravagant balls and dinners, Vanderbilt also organized women’s suffrage rallies at the property and used her wealth to advocate for the cause. She even wrote the libretto for a women’s suffrage operetta that was performed at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York in 1915.

In recent years, the HBO series “The Gilded Age” has used Marble House as a filming location.

Take a look inside this historic Newport mansion.