Newport Preservation Society
Newport, R.I.
During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, wealthy industrialist families from the Northeast began building summer homes in Newport, R.I., a beautiful island town in New England. Today, a concentration of these palatial homes makes Newport one of the country’s chief destinations for lovers of historic mansions.
“The families would come for the summer months and only use the homes for six to eight weeks out of the year,” said Andrea Carneiro, communications manager for the Newport Preservation Society, which owns and operates 10 historic homes. “It was a society built on entertaining, parties, going to the beach and sports. It was a period of great consumption, and there was a lot of money being made and spent.”
Many people know of the Breakers, the area’s most famous home, but numerous mansions in town merit a visit. In 1892, William Vanderbilt constructed the Marble House, using 500,000 cubic feet of marble. The home features a ballroom covered in 22-carat gold leaf, as well as a Chinese teahouse on the back lawn overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
The Elms, a French-style chateau built in 1901, was the most technologically advanced house of its time, fully electrified with no gas backup. The home sits on 10 acres, with a classical sunken garden.
“One of the things that set these houses apart is the landscapes,” Carneiro said. “We have 88 acres of gardens, and they’re really quite stunning.”
www.newportmansions.org
Marland Mansion
Ponca City, Okla.
In the early 1900s, the discovery of oil in Oklahoma and Texas created a new kind of wealth, this time infused with a rugged Southwestern spirit. In Ponca City, Marland Mansion is one of the prime examples of the newfound wealth of the Oklahoma oil barons.
E.W. Marland, one-time owner of 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves, built the home in 1925 at a cost of $5.5 million.
“It’s one acre under a roof,” said director David Keathly. “There are 43,560 square feet on four levels. It’s an Italian Renaissance villa modeled after the Davanzanti palace in Florence.”
Visitors to the mansion will find elegance and opulence in every room. The ballroom features a gold ceiling complete with Waterford crystal chandeliers valued at $2 million on today’s market.
The dining room’s Elizabethan English motif features Pollard Oak paneling that was harvested from the royal forest in England with the permission of the king.
An informal banquet hall on the lower level has ceiling murals that tell the story of Oklahoma’s American Indian groups, along with a 500-year-old banquet table and chairs built by English monks.
Groups can tour the mansion and the accompanying chauffeur’s cottage, six-car garage, boathouse, artist studio, lake and formal gardens.
“For motorcoaches, we have re-enactors portraying Mr. and Mrs. Marland,” Keathly said.
www.marlandmansion.com
Villa Zorayda
St. Augustine, Fla.
Franklin Waldo Smith, a wealthy Bostonian with a passion for world travel, built Villa Zorayda as a winter home in St. Augustine in 1883.
“He built it to be a miniature of one area of the Alhambra in Spain, and he brought in elements from all over the world,” said curator James Byles. “The traceries that cover the walls were made in Spain in the late 1880s of crushed alabaster and plaster, and are exact replicas off the walls of the Alhambra.
“The tile floors in the villa came from Seville and are about 400 years old. The tiled wainscoting surrounding the Court of Lion came from Egypt and dates back to the 12th century.”
During the Victorian period, Villa Zorayda was the talk of St. Augustine, and Smith and his family held many teas and balls there. Later, the building was leased out as a dining and dancing club, and then became a casino.
In the 1930s, A.S. Mussallem purchased the villa, and his family has operated it as a museum ever since, closing for a massive renovation from 2000 to 2008.
Today, the castle includes all of the original artistic touches, along with a 98 percent-original collection of furnishings belonging to the Smith and Mussallem families.
Visitors will see a three-piece settee and gaming table given to Smith by the king of Egypt, as well as a 2,400-year-old rug made from the hair of cats in the Nile River region.
“The rug is said to have a curse on it — if you walked on it, you would be cursed,” Byles said. “We’ve never known anyone who has walked on the rug.”
