Marble House is the most architecturally pure of Newport's Gilded Age cottages — a Beaux-Arts Marble palace on Bellevue Avenue designed by Richard Morris Hunt and completed in 1892 for William Kissam Vanderbilt. Five hundred thousand cubic feet of white Tuckahoe marble went into the exterior; the interiors include a Gold Room ballroom with walls plated in bronze and gilding, and a Gothic Room of German carved oak.
The house is smaller than The Breakers but more concentrated in its opulence: every surface is a demonstration of wealth and international taste. The story of Alva Vanderbilt, who commissioned the house and later used it for suffragist fundraising after her divorce, gives the place more biographical interest than most of the Preservation Society properties. The Chinese Tea House in the back garden — added by Alva in 1913 — is an unexpected coda to the European-dominated aesthetic of the mansion itself.