See inside Marble House, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont's 140,000-square-foot Newport mansion that appears in 'The Gilded Age'

Marble House is in Newport, Rhode Island.

Alexander Nesbitt — The Preservation Society of Newport County

Alva Vanderbilt's 39th birthday present from her husband was a 140,000-square-foot summer "cottage" on the shores of Newport, Rhode Island.As heir to the Vanderbilt family fortune during the Gilded Age, William K. Vanderbilt spared no expense in building Marble House for his wife. It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the same architect who worked on The Breakers, another expansive Newport mansion. Construction cost around $11 million in 1892, or about $387 million in today's dollars. The home's 500,000 cubic feet of marble alone cost about $7 million, or around $246 million today.The marriage didn't last, but Marble House remained in her possession after their divorce, when she remarried and became known as Alva Belmont. In addition to throwing extravagant balls and dinner parties, Belmont also hosted women's suffrage rallies on the property and leveraged her wealth to champion the cause. She even wrote the libretto for an operetta about women's suffrage, which was performed at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1915.In recent years, the HBO show "The Gilded Age" has used Marble House as a film set.I visited the expansive home in August 2024. Take a look inside this historic Newport mansion.