Part of the Bellevue Avenue Historic District, the first version of the residence was built between 1852 and 1853 and designed in the Italianate style by Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux.

Richard Morris Hunt renovated the estate in 1881 after it was bought the year before by William Backhouse Astor, Jr. Beechwood was built as a marine villa for New Yorker Daniel Parish, a clothing merchant whose operations extended to Southern cities.

Being a nephew of Thomas Powell, a steamboat magnate from Newburgh, New York, Parish commissioned the design from Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux, whose office was based there.

[7] Over the course of the subsequent four decades, the house was owned in succession by James Cameron Clark, Gurnee Dyer, William W. Carey, John Page-Blair and Richard Merrill.

Together with the University of Rhode Island History and Drama Departments, he started the "Beechwood Theatre Company", which conducted live theatrical tours to over a million mansion visitors.

[3] In 1981, Paul Madden re-opened the renovated house with 20 costumed actors who were trained to remain in character as they played all the roles of a Victorian household, including butlers, footmen, maids, and doormen.

[15] Ellison, who was in Newport during the summer of 2009 for training with his BMW Oracle Racing team, is linked to a deed filed at City Hall that documents the $10.5 million sale of the 39-room mansion.

[16] Ellison reportedly spent over $100 million restoring the mansion and the other buildings on the estate to the condition that Richard Morris Hunt brought them in 1881, although as of August 2018 landscaping of the grounds had not begun.

In February 2019, it was reported that Ellison purchased the Seacliff home at 562 Bellevue Avenue (for $11 million), "thus giving him ownership of all four properties between Rosecliff and Marble House", which reunited the original 9-acre estate that William B. Astor Jr. had created in 1881.