The Breakers

The Breakers stands on Ochre Point Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, completed in 1895 as a summer residence for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, head of the New York Central Railroad and grandson of the family's shipping and rail fortune founder, to a design by the architect Richard Morris Hunt. Built in an Italian Renaissance palazzo style modeled loosely on sixteenth-century Genoese palaces, its 70-room interior includes extensive imported marble, gilded ceilings and a two-story great hall intended to rival the grandest European aristocratic residences, reflecting the scale of Gilded Age American industrial wealth. The mansion was designed with fireproof construction throughout, including a steel frame, after an earlier Vanderbilt summer house on a nearby site burned down, a lesson Hunt applied directly to the building's structural planning. The Preservation Society of Newport County has operated The Breakers as a house museum since leasing it from the Vanderbilt family in 1948, and it remains the largest and most visited of Newport's Gilded Age summer cottages.