The Breakers

Interesting facts

The billiards room is walled in Italian cipollino marble with rose alabaster arches, inlaid with semi-precious stone mosaics of billiard balls and acorns.

The acorn, which appears throughout the decoration, was the Vanderbilt family emblem, chosen to stand for strength and longevity.

The stained-glass skylight over the grand staircase is by John La Farge and was taken from the dining room of the Vanderbilts' New York townhouse.

The platinum-leaf panels of the Morning Room show eight of the nine Muses.

Alice Vanderbilt's oval bedroom had four closets, allowing for as many as seven changes of clothes in a day, and hidden corridors let maids work unseen.

Running the house took some 33 indoor servants, and its boilers burned more than 150 tons of coal every year.

The two staff wings on the third floor hold 30 bedrooms, with separate rooms for the butler, chef and visiting valets on a mezzanine behind the kitchen.

In January 1943 more than 500 air-raid wardens and volunteers held a major civil defence drill in the mansion's basements.

Descendants of the Vanderbilts kept an apartment on the third floor until 2018, and those rooms were opened to visitors in 2024.

With around 450,000 visitors a year, it was the most-visited attraction in Rhode Island as of 2017.

Why it is worth it

The Breakers is the grandest of the summer "cottages" that America's richest families built along the cliffs of Newport in the Gilded Age, and the one that came to stand for the whole era. Built between 1893 and 1895 for Cornelius Vanderbilt II of the wealthy Vanderbilt family, it is a 70-room palazzo in the Italian Renaissance Revival style by Richard Morris Hunt, set on a 14-acre estate above the Atlantic.

Vanderbilt bought the property in 1885; when the earlier mansion on the site, built for Pierre Lorillard IV, burned in 1892, he asked Hunt for a replacement that would be as fireproof as possible. The result has a structure of masonry and steel trusses with no wooden framing, and its boilers were placed in a vault under the front lawn, away from the house. The interiors, by the Parisian firm Jules Allard and Sons and the decorator Ogden Codman Jr., use marble from Italy and Africa, rare woods and mosaics, and fittings bought from French châteaux. The Great Hall rises about 50 feet in each dimension, with sculpted groups above its doors honouring science, literature, the arts, commerce, architecture and sculpture. The dining room, the richest in the house, has twelve rose alabaster Corinthian columns and a ceiling painting of Aurora bringing in the dawn; the Morning Room was made in France, shipped across the Atlantic and assembled on site, its wall panels finished in platinum leaf.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II died in 1899, and his widow Alice kept the house until her death in 1934, when it passed to their youngest daughter, Countess Gladys Széchenyi. During the Second World War its basements served as Newport's first air-raid shelter. From 1948 Gladys leased the house to the Preservation Society of Newport County for a token one dollar a year so that its main floors could be shown to the public, and in 1972 the Society bought it from her heirs. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1994.

Newport, a seaside city on Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island founded in 1639, became the summer resort of America's wealthiest families in the late nineteenth century; The Breakers belongs to the Bellevue Avenue Historic District and looks out over Easton Bay.

Getting there

The Breakers is at 44 Ochre Point Avenue in Newport, about 2.6 km from the town centre. The closest airfield is Newport State Airport (NPT), about 7 km away, which has no scheduled airline service; the nearest airport with airline service is Rhode Island T. F. Green International Airport (PVD) in Warwick, about 30 km away in a straight line.

The Breakers

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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