The Breakers

The Vanderbilt fortune began with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the shipping and railroad magnate known as the Commodore, who became one of the richest men in American history. By the late nineteenth century his descendants were among the leading families of the American elite, and they built to match.

The Gilded Age, the decades after the Civil War when industrial fortunes exploded, saw the newly rich compete in conspicuous display, and Newport became their summer capital. Along its shore the wealthiest families raised enormous mansions they modestly called cottages, staffed by armies of servants and used for a brief, intense social season of balls, dinners, and yachting.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II commissioned the architect Richard Morris Hunt to build The Breakers as the largest and most magnificent of them all, completed in 1895. It was meant to announce the family's standing at the very top of American society, and in scale and expense it succeeded.

Richard Morris Hunt modeled The Breakers on the grand palaces of Renaissance Italy, and the house was built of stone and steel to be as fireproof as possible after an earlier Vanderbilt house on the site had burned. Its heating plant was placed well away from the mansion, underground, for the same reason.

Inside, no expense was spared. Craftsmen and materials were brought from Europe, and the interiors combine marble, alabaster, gilded bronze, mosaic, and carved stone. The centerpiece is the great hall, rising two full stories to a painted ceiling of sky, meant to feel like an open-air Italian courtyard brought indoors.

For all its grandeur, the house also reflects its moment technologically, wired for electricity and fitted with the modern conveniences the era's wealth could command, a blend of old-world splendor and new industrial power.

The Breakers is not only a story of the family who owned it but of the many people who ran it. Behind the opulent public rooms lay an extensive world of kitchens, service corridors, and servants' quarters, where a large staff worked to sustain the household during its short, demanding summer season.

Modern tours increasingly tell both sides, the glittering life of the Vanderbilts above and the labor of the cooks, maids, footmen, and grounds staff below, giving a fuller and more honest picture of how such a place actually functioned.

That contrast, extraordinary luxury sustained by an unseen workforce, is part of what makes The Breakers such a vivid window into the Gilded Age, an era of both dazzling wealth and deep inequality.

The Breakers sits at the edge of the sea on Ochre Point, and its grounds run to the top of the bluff where the famous Cliff Walk passes. From the lawn and the loggia, the view is straight out over the Atlantic.

That location makes it easy to combine a mansion tour with a walk along the shore. The Cliff Walk threads the boundary between the manicured estates and the wild rocky coast, giving a rare public view of both the mansions and the sea they were built to command.

Newport itself, with its colonial harbor town, its other mansions, and its sailing history, spreads out just beyond, so The Breakers works well as the centerpiece of a broader day in one of America's great historic resorts.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.