White's father was a dandy and Anglophile with little money but many connections to New York's art world, including the painter John LaFarge, the stained-glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

Beginning at age 18, he worked for six years as the principal assistant to Henry Hobson Richardson, known for his personal style (often called "Richardsonian Romanesque") and considered by many to have been the greatest American architect of his day.

[4] Elsewhere in New York City, White designed the Villard Houses (1884), the second Madison Square Garden (1890, demolished in 1925),[6] the Cable Building at 611 Broadway (1893),[7] the baldechin (1888 to mid-1890s)[8] and altars of Blessed Virgin[9] and St. Joseph[10] (both completed in 1905) at St. Paul the Apostle Church, the New York Herald Building (1894; demolished 1921), and the IRT Powerhouse on 11th Avenue and 58th Street.

White also designed the Bowery Savings Bank Building at the intersection of the Bowery and Grand Street (1894), Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, the Lambs Club Building, the Century Club, Madison Square Presbyterian Church, as well as the Gould Memorial Library (1900), built for New York University's Bronx campus but now part of Bronx Community College.

White designed a number of other New York mansions as well, including the Iselin family estate "All View" and "Four Chimneys" in New Rochelle, suburban Westchester County.

Among his "cottages" in Newport, Rhode Island, at Rosecliff (1898–1902, designed for Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs) he adapted Mansart's Grand Trianon.

The mansion was built for large receptions, dinners, and dances with spatial planning and well-contrived dramatic internal views en filade.

His "informal" shingled cottages usually featured double corridors for separate circulation, so that a guest never bumped into a laundress with a basket of bed linens.

One of the few surviving urban residences designed by White is the Ross R. Winans Mansion in Baltimore's Mount Vernon-Belvedere neighborhood.

Since its period as Winans's residence, it has served as a girls preparatory school, doctor's offices, and a funeral parlor, before being acquired by Agora Publishing.

He extended the limits of architectural services to include interior decoration, dealing in art and antiques, and planning and designing parties.

If White could not acquire the right antiques for his interiors, he would sketch neo-Georgian standing electroliers or a Renaissance library table.

One room was painted green and outfitted with a red velvet swing, which hung from the ceiling suspended by ivy-twined ropes.

It has been suggested,without any substantiated proof, that he may have used playing with the elaborate swing as a means to attract women, including Evelyn Nesbit, a popular photographer's fashion model and chorus dancer.

[17][18] After White was killed and the newspapers began to investigate his life, continuing through the trial of Thaw, it was suggested that the married architect engaged in sexual relations with numerous women.

The White family historian Suzannah Lessard writes: The process of seduction was a major feature of Stanford's obsession with sex, and it was an inexorable kind of seduction which moved into the lives of very young women, sometimes barely pubescent girls, in fragile social and financial situations—girls who would be unlikely to resist his power and his money and his considerable charm, who would feel that they had little choice but to let him take over their lives.

According to Simon Baatz: He was one of a group of wealthy roués, all members of the Union Club, who organized frequent orgies in secret locations scattered about the city.

Other members of the group included Henry Poor, a financier; James Lawrence Breese, a wealthy man-about-town with an avocational interest in photography; Charles MacDonald, a stockbroker and principal shareholder in the Southern Pacific Railroad; and Thomas Clarke, a dealer in antiques.

Twain said that New York society had known for years preceding the incident that the married White was eagerly and diligently and ravenously and remorselessly hunting young girls to their destruction.

[26] Accompanied by New York society figure James Clinch Smith,[27] White dined at Martin's, near Madison Square Garden.

[29] Years later, he would write, "On the night of June 25th, 1906, while attending a performance at Madison Square Garden, Stanford White was shot from behind [by] a crazed profligate whose great wealth was used to besmirch his victim's memory during the series of notorious trials that ensued.

A headline in Vanity Fair read "Stanford White, Voluptuary and Pervert, Dies the Death of a Dog".

Newspaper accounts drew from the trial transcripts to describe White as "a sybarite of debauchery, a man who abandoned lofty enterprises for vicious revels".

"[34] Richard Harding Davis, a war correspondent and reputedly the model for the "Gibson Man", was angered by the press accounts, which he said presented a distorted view of his friend White.

[35]The autopsy report, made public by the coroner's testimony at the Thaw trial, revealed that White was in poor health when killed.