The Breakers

The Breakers is the grandest of Newport's Gilded Age 'summer cottages' — a 70-room Italian Renaissance palazzo built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, whose family's railroad fortune made them the richest in America. Designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt and perched on the cliffs above the Atlantic, its marble halls, gilded rooms, and sweeping ocean views embody the extravagance of the late 19th century. Today it is Rhode Island's most visited attraction and a definitive monument to America's Gilded Age.

By the 1890s Newport, Rhode Island, had become the summer playground of America's wealthiest families, who built lavish seaside mansions they modestly called 'cottages.' Cornelius Vanderbilt II — grandson of the shipping and railroad tycoon Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and chairman of the New York Central Railroad — had bought a property called The Breakers, but its wooden house burned down in 1892.

To replace it, Vanderbilt hired Richard Morris Hunt, the leading architect of the age, who had also designed the family's Biltmore estate in North Carolina. Between 1893 and 1895 Hunt raised a five-story, 70-room mansion modeled on the Renaissance palazzos of Genoa and Turin, built to be fireproof with a steel frame and clad in Indiana limestone. Its interiors were fitted with imported marble, alabaster, rare woods, and gilded rooms crafted by teams of European artisans.

The Vanderbilts summered at The Breakers in grand style, but the family's fortunes and tastes shifted in the 20th century. In 1948 the Preservation Society of Newport County leased the mansion and opened it to the public, later buying it outright, while a member of the Vanderbilt family continued to live in an upper-floor apartment for decades. Now a National Historic Landmark, The Breakers is the most visited historic house in Rhode Island.