Newport’s coal-fortune palace hides a Venetian jewel box of art, marble, and gilded oak just off its grand ballroom. The Elms’ dining room, built to display Edward Julius Berwind’s newly purchased cycle of early-18th-century Venetian paintings, fuses French château planning with Italian Renaissance exuberance. Oak paneling grained to ox-blood warmth, a stucco “wood” ceiling flashed with winged lions of Saint Mark, four custom crystal chandeliers, and a nineteen-foot mantel of green marble, onyx, and bronze created a stage where forty servants choreographed multi-course dinners while dumbwaiters whisked dishes up from a basement kitchen. Saved from demolition in 1962, the room today glows exactly as it did when guests filed in by candle-and-electric light to dine beneath Alexander the Great and Scipio Africanus.
Background: A Tech-Savvy French Château
Completed in 1901 for coal titan Edward J. Berwind, The Elms cost about $1.4 million, over $50 million in 2025 dollars, and was among the first U.S. houses wired solely for electricity with no gas backup. Architect Horace Trumbauer modeled the limestone shell on the Château d’Asnières and hid a steel frame, concrete floors, and terra-cotta block partitions to make the mansion virtually fire-proof.
Location & Layout
Trumbauer placed the dining room in the south wing on axis with the entrance hall, ballroom, and garden terrace, ensuring guests flowed directly from reception to table. A serving pantry and elevator-fed dumbwaiter linked the space invisibly to basement kitchens and second-floor china storage, so service remained silent and swift.
Design Highlights
Oak & Gilt Envelope
- Oak paneling rises to a gilt cornice, creating a jewel-box warmth that offsets the mansion’s colder marble halls.
- A stucco-molded coffered ceiling—painted deep green and faux-grained to imitate wood—carries bracketed coffers stamped with the winged lion of Saint Mark, Venice’s symbol, nodding to Berwind’s art source.
Monumental Fireplace
A nineteen-foot mantel of green marble, agate, onyx, and bronze nearly reaches the ceiling; oak Ionic columns frame a pedimented over-mantel niche that once held silver service pieces.
Light & Color
Four bespoke crystal chandeliers anchor the room’s corners, their prisms multiplying candle-and-electric glow across the gilt ceiling coffers.
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Art as Architecture
Berwind bought an ensemble of early-1700s Venetian canvases; scenes of Alexander the Great and Scipio Africanus by the school of Giambattista Tiepolo fill the upper wall bays. The paintings were sold off after Julia Berwind’s death. Four of the six smaller canvases were repurchased in 2004, and the final two were acquired and rehung in 2012, completing the set in its original setting.
Rituals of Dining
Dinner at The Elms followed rigid protocol (as did all during the Gilded Age): footmen in livery drew oak chairs, guests adhered to place cards dictated by rank, and French haute cuisine blended with New England seafood in as many as fourteen courses. Dumbwaiters delivered each plate piping hot, while a hidden musicians’ gallery off the ballroom supplied waltzes through the open doors.
Preservation & Today’s Experience
When the Preservation Society of Newport County bought The Elms in 1962, the dining room’s ceiling paint, gilt, and chandeliers were meticulously conserved; climate control now protects the Venetian canvases and green-onyx mantel from Rhode Island humidity. Visitors can still trace the lion-stamped coffers overhead and imagine the rustle of silk gowns beneath the gaze of Venice’s patron beast.
