Backdated Birthday Post - Day 3

Today was a really full day. Karaoqueen and I decided to tour ALL of the open mansions. It was ridiculous. 

Me and Karaoqueen excited and ready to tour!

Here are the highlights of each one:

The Breakers
Since this is the biggest mansion, we decided to go here first. The Breakers was owned by the Vanderbilts. They had central heating and also functional fireplaces. They had electricity which was really exciting back in those days, but they also had gas as a backup since electricity was new and unreliable. The house has 14 bedrooms and 20 bathrooms. The bathrooms each had four taps - hot and cold regular water and hot and cold salt water because salt water was believed to be therapeutic back then. There are hidden servent's corridors and hidden doors connecting some of the rooms so that the servants could slip unseen between the rooms to do their jobs. Mrs. Vanderbilt alone had four clothes closets because she would change clothes up to seven times per day. If you look closely around the mansion you will se recurring theme of acorns. This is because when the architect R. M. Hunt asked Mrs W. K. Vanderbilt for a Vanderbilt Family Motto in 1883, she gave him the David Everett quote "Tall oaks from little acorns grow."

Main hall of the Breakers.

Karaoqueen in the Breakers main hall.

Look at how gorgeous this is!

This ceiling is amazing.

Random indoor pool under the staircase.

Music room.

Bedroom with call buttons for summoning the servants.

One of the hidden doors.

I have some serious kitchen envy.

This is the butler's pantry with Karaoqueen in it to give a sense of the scale.

This is why they were called the breakers.

The Elms

The Elms was owned by the Burwinds. They had 40 servants with the accompanying system of call buttons, phones, electric dumbwaiters, a special servant's driveway covered by wisteria so it's invisible from the main house, two kitchens (a cold kitchen and a hot kitchen) etc. Fun fact: apparently in this time period the phone was considered rude and was only used for summoning servants - hand written notes sent by the post or delivered by servants was considered more proper. Another thing I learned is that ladies' servants would put on their fancy silk buttons before each dress wear and then cut them off again before washing to preserve them. They would also add things like ribbons or lace to a dress before it was worn and cut it off again after to reuse differently so that each time the woman in question wore the dress it looked different. 

Stairway from the first to the second floor.

Bedroom.

Dining room.

Me on my tour!

Random statue.

I am IN LOVE with these light fixtures. I want them!

Pretty room.

The hot kitchen. 

Marble House

This house was also owned by the Vanderbilt family and I really love the owner of this one! Mrs. Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont (1853-1933) was first married to William K Vanderbilt in 1875. She got divorced – which was super rare at the time. She then met Anna Howard Shaw, a noted suffragist and she dedicated the rest of her life to working with the most militant groups of the suffrage movement. The “Votes for Women” motto was used in 1909 at the famous suffrage open house held at Marble House (she even had “Votes for Women” plates made!). Mrs. Belmont later married her husband’s friend and moved down the street. Keeping up with the family trend, her daughter also divorced her first husband the 9th duke of Marlborough (though she had to pay him alimony because he made less money than her). 

Some of the original "Votes for Women" plates - you can buy reproductions in the gift shop if you're so inclined.

The house itself is made of 500,000 cubic feet of marble and contains 50 rooms. The grand salon is a guilded room covered in 22-K gold. The gothic room was designed around the art inside it. Fun fact: Back then rick people used to buy artwork in blocks for furnishing their houses. Weird, right? This house had only one guest room because all of the wealthy people would just rent entire houses if they were coming down for a visit rather than staying in friends' houses. The chef at Marble House was chef Rameau – a famous French chef who was paid $10,000/year which was a TON of money at that time. The other interesting thing about Marble House, which we didn't get to see due to the season, is the Chinese tea house which was built on the other end of the lawn. Maybe next time?

Stairway to the second floor. 

More of the stairway.

Dining room.

Bedroom. I want this room.

Guilded room.

Amazing chandelier closeup.

The gothic room.

Rosecliff
This was the last house we visited and my personal favorite. It was owned by Theresa Fair Oelrichs and built by Stanford White in 1899 (completed in 1902 at a cost of $2.5 million). Ms. Oelrichs was the daughter of an Irish immigrant known as the "Bonanza King" because he made his fortune by unearthing the Comstock Lode - the single largest deposit of gold and silver ever found. Ms. Oelrichs married Hermann Oelrichs, the steamship tycoon but despite her father's wedding gift of a million dollars she didn't invite him to the wedding. She then purchased Rosecliff and hired architect Stanford White to renovate it. The ballroom in this house is the largest single private room of any house in Newport. And as you would expect from a house with a gigantic ballroom, this house was a party house and Ms. Oelrich's parties were famous. Despite the happy front they put on for guests, Ms. Oelrichs and her husband were estranged and lived apart. They never got officially divorced and she always hoped they would reconcile but that didn't happen. She went mad eventually and the stories honestly make her sound a bit like Miss Havisham, the orphan Estella's wealthy and eccentric elderly adoptive aunt from Great Expectations by Dickens. Fun house fact: Cole porter wrote part of the musical Anything Goes and the song Night and Day while staying here.

The staircase to the second floor. I may have done a stately walk down here pretending to be wealthy and famous.

The ballroom.

More of the ballroom.

Gorgeous indoor fountain.

Living room.

Another living room. Look at that chandelier!

Same room without the view of the chandelier.

Unexpectedly, the top floor of the house had been turned into a museum and the main exhibition was Pierre Cardin: 70 Years of Innovation. Clearly this exhibit made my little fashionisto heart sing! We got to see 42 of his designs from the 1950s to today. Some of them fabulous, some of them utterly ridiculous, and all of them incredibly original.

This ridiculous ensemble was my absolute favorite. Utterly impractical and utterly fabulous.

Also on display was a room full of caricatures by the French Guilded Age artist SEM aka Georges Goursat (1863-1934). I've seen some of these in art books, so it was cool to see them in person.

After all of our mansion tours, we were pretty tired so we went for to a Pasta Beach, a restaurant recommended to us by a woman who worked in the gift shop of Marble House. No pictures of that, though. After eating, we went back to the hotel to see the view from the roof again. It was super cold and rainy.

Cold Karaoqueen.

Pretty view.

At this point, we decided it was time for a nap break. (Can you tell I had a cold?)

Naptime!

After our naps, we ventured out again. I wasn't hungry but Karaoqueen wanted dinner so we went to Mission, the other place recommended to us. Apparently it was very good. They didn't have any vegetarian options but I stole some of her fries so I can vouch for those.

From there we wandered the town a bit and got ice cream at Kilwins. It was AMAZING. Happy birthday to me!

Me and Karaoqueen with our ice creams!