Step inside Marble House and the roar of Newport’s oceanfront society fades to a quiet hum of history. Beyond its marble salons and gilded ballroom lies the Gothic Room, a hushed, chapel-like gallery created for Alva Vanderbilt’s personal trove of medieval art. Understanding this singular space begins with the story of Marble House itself—an $11 million birthday gift completed in 1892 whose marble walls signaled the moment Newport’s wooden “summer cottages” gave way to stone palaces.
Marble House Background
Rising on Bellevue Avenue, Marble House was designed by Richard Morris Hunt and inspired by the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Construction from 1888 to 1892 consumed some 500,000 cubic feet of imported marble and an estimated $11 million, roughly $385 million in 2025 dollars, making it the costliest American home of its day. French decorator Jules Allard & Sons outfitted 50 rooms with boiseries, gilt bronze, and painted ceilings, while landscape architect Ernest W. Bowditch shaped the formal grounds. After divorcing William Kissam Vanderbilt in 1895, Alva retained sole title to Marble House and later used its Chinese Tea House terrace as a stage for women’s suffrage rallies.
The Gothic Room
Among the mansion’s most storied interiors is the Gothic Room, pre-fabricated in Allard’s Paris workshops and reassembled in Newport between 1891 and 1892. Oak paneling, a rib-vaulted plaster ceiling, jewel-toned lancet windows, and a towering Caen-limestone fireplace, copied from the mid-15th-century Palais Jacques Cœur in Bourges, evoke a flamboyant French chapel.To fill the gallery, Alva purchased collector Émile Gavet’s entire cache of more than 300 medieval and Renaissance objects in 1889 for about $1 million, transforming the room into one of America’s earliest purpose-built private museums for scholarly study.
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Hidden Design Highlights
Allard’s craftsmen engineered the stained-glass lancets so exterior walls remained classically uniform; from outside, the vivid windows are invisible, preserving Hunt’s neoclassical façade. Look closely at the fireplace cornice: amid gothic foliage you will spot carved crabs and lobsters, a playful nod to Newport’s coastal setting that links medieval Paris to Narragansett Bay. Furniture by Parisian artisan Gilbert Cuel—including carved walnut cassoni and choir-stall chairs—completes the immersive tableau.
From Private Museum to Public Treasure
When Marble House closed for a time in the 1920s, Alva sold most of the Gavet collection. Many pieces went to circus magnate John Ringling and now reside at the Ringling Museum in Florida. Thanks to loans and digital repatriation projects, visitors today can once again see select objects in situ, and a 2010 exhibition reunited dozens of originals with the room for the first time since 1927. Ongoing conservation efforts, such as the 2015 return of a 15th-century Sienese cassone, continue to restore the Gothic Room’s scholarly spirit for twenty-first-century audiences.
From its marble foundations to its medieval reliquary, Marble House encapsulates the Gilded Age’s restless blend of wealth, artistry, and ambition—nowhere more eloquently than in the dim, vaulted hush of the Gothic Room.
