An 1895 Newport, Rhode Island mansion goes on sale for US$5 million
The house sits on 4.85 acres, and has 12 bedrooms, eight full bathrooms, and three half-baths
Sophie Girard’s family has been in Newport, Rhode Island, for what she estimates is 17 generations. She is a direct descendant of Roger Williams – who founded the state capital Providence in 1636 – and of Nicholas Brown, after whom Brown University is named.
One of the primary heiresses in the family at the turn of the 20th century had “as much as US$80 million,” Girard says, pointing out that it was “not a lot, compared to the Vanderbilts”.
It wasn’t until 1895, that Girard’s great-great uncle Harold Brown built a 13,962-square-foot holiday house on Bellevue Avenue in Newport with his wife Georgette. (Harold was Nicholas’s grandson and a member of Ward McAllister’s “Four Hundred” grouping of top society in New York.)
The 25-room house has a Gilded Age pedigree that would make Edith Wharton jealous. It was designed by Dudley Newton, one of Newport’s most prolific architects during its heyday. Its landscaping was done by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted (co-designer of New York’s Central and Prospect parks); and its interiors were designed by Ogden Codman, who co-wrote a book on interior decoration with Edith Wharton.
Napoleon’s bed
Though the exterior of the home is apparently designed in a “Norman hunting style”, its interior was inspired, Girard says, by her ancestors’ honeymoon in Paris. “They fell in love with the Empire style,” she says, referring to a look developed during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. “They collected furniture from the period and even bought a set once owned by Napoleon.”
Codman duly designed the rest of the interior to match the bedroom set (which Girard says was donated to the Rhode Island School of Design “years ago”), and the rest of the house remained unchanged until Georgette’s death in 1958.
At that point, the house was bought from Georgette’s estate by her niece, Eileen Slocum, a socialite and a major force in Republican politics. Slocum and her husband John (a foreign service officer whose collection of James Joyce manuscripts and editions is now part of Yale’s rare books library), bought the house for about US$85,000.