Marble House, a Gilded Age mansion located at 596 Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, was built from 1888 to 1892 as a summer cottage for Alva and William Kissam Vanderbilt and was designed by Richard Morris Hunt in the Beaux Arts style.

It was a social landmark that helped spark the transformation of Newport from a relatively relaxed summer colony of wooden houses to its current image as a resort of opulent stone palaces.

The fifty-room mansion required a staff of 36 servants, including butlers, maids, coachmen, and footmen.

[7] When Alva Vanderbilt divorced William in 1895, she already owned Marble House outright, having received it as her 39th birthday present.

[3] Alva Belmont closed the mansion permanently in 1919, when she relocated to France to be closer to her daughter, Consuelo Balsan.

For more than 30 years, the Prince family carefully occupied the house during Newport's summer season, taking special efforts to leave the vast majority of the interior intact as the Vanderbilts had originally intended.

Continuing late into the early morning hours, the ball welcomed internationally known guests including then Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy; Mr. and Mrs. E. Sheldon Whitehouse; the Astors; and Count Anthony and Countess Sylvia Szapary of the Vanderbilt family.

[2] The mansion still stands in great visible condition and is used for many things such as guided and non-guided tours, as well as hosting various special events, parties, and weddings.

Marble House, one of the earliest examples of Beaux-Arts architecture in the United States, is loosely inspired by the Petit Trianon at the Palace of Versailles.

Load-bearing walls are brick, with their exterior sides faced in white Westchester marble, which Hunt detailed in the manner of French neoclassical architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A curved marble carriage ramp, fronted by a semi-circular fountain with grotesque masks, spans the entire western facade.

[5] Architect Richard Morris Hunt hired Giuseppe Moretti to produce the interior's marble friezes and statuary, including work on bas-reliefs of Hunt and Jules Hardouin Mansart, the master architect for Louis XIV during the construction of Palace of Versailles; and which stood side by side on the mezzanine level of the staircase.

Designed in the Louis XIV style, it features green silk cut velvet upholstery and draperies.

The stone fireplace in the room was copied by Allard and Sons from one in the Jacques Cœur House in Bourges.