Newport’s Gilded Age estate and Old Hollywood’s mansions were cut from the same cloth: oversized homes built for oversized personalities. In Newport, industrial barons like the Vanderbilts commissioned European-inspired palaces where marble walls and carved ceilings turned summer cottages into full-blown monuments. Out west, Hollywood stars like Harold Lloyd and Rudolph Valentino did the same, creating sprawling Spanish Revival villas and French châteaux on canyon ridges that doubled as their personal stages.
The architects mirrored their clients’ ambitions. Richard Morris Hunt brought French opulence to Newport, while Wallace Neff and Roland Coate crafted Mediterranean mansions that let movie stars play landed gentry under the California sun. Both coasts flaunted their wealth with every carved balustrade, every imported tile. The difference? Newport’s homes were mainly built for summers and society balls; Hollywood’s for year-round living.
Today, Newport’s mansions are carefully preserved museums, while many Hollywood estates have been altered, sold, or forgotten. But for a moment in time, both stood as symbols of success — one region flaunting steel and rail fortunes, the other basking in box office receipts.
First Up – 10 of the Grandest Mansions Built in Newport
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The Newport mansions arose during America’s Gilded Age (1870s-1900s) as summer retreats for the nation’s wealthiest families, who sought to escape urban heat and display their immense wealth through architectural grandeur. These seasonal “cottages,” built in various European architectural styles, transformed Newport, Rhode Island from a colonial port into America’s premier resort destination for high society. The mansions served as stages for elaborate social events during the eight-week summer season, when America’s elite engaged in complex rituals of entertaining and social climbing.
10. Beechwood
Beechwood started life as a tidy Italianate villa in 1853, courtesy of Calvert Vaux, with just enough Palladian flair to suit his client Daniel Parish. A fire in 1855 wiped the slate clean, but it wasn’t until William Backhouse Astor Jr. bought the place in 1880 that things got serious. The Astors didn’t do “modest,” so they called in Richard Morris Hunt, who turned Beechwood into a proper Gilded Age mansion — big, formal, and ready for entertaining.
The upgrades were strategic. Hunt gave the house a ballroom large enough to host Mrs. Astor’s famed “Four Hundred,” her velvet-roped list of society’s elite. The library, music room, and dining hall balanced opulence with control, all sharp lines and Paris-imported details. Outside, manicured grounds framed the house with restrained grandeur.
By the time Hunt was done, Beechwood was the summer HQ for high society. Guests floated through the ballroom while servants navigated unseen back corridors. Generations of owners added their touches, but Hunt’s bones hold steady.
9. Ochre Court
In 1892, Ogden Goelet — a banker, yachtsman, and member of America’s nouveau-riche elite — hired Richard Morris Hunt to conjure up a summer palace. Hunt, never one to do things by halves, delivered a sprawling Louis XIII-style fantasy, complete with turrets, dormers, and towering chimneys.
Inside, Hunt went full medieval-meets-renaissance mashup with grand halls dressed in heraldic emblems, carved saints and angels looking down from niches, and stained glass scattering light across Gothic archways. Classical ceiling murals nod to Europe’s old-world splendor, but the Goelets brought the servants to keep it running—twenty-seven maids, eight coachmen, and a dozen gardeners wrangling the gardens’ manicured elegance.
The scale is absurd — second only to The Breakers in Newport — but that was the point. After all, the Goelets’ daughter, May, would need a fitting stage for her dowry on the way to marrying a duke.
8. Chepstow
Chepstow is as much about its story as its stuccoed Italianate structure. Built in 1860 for Edmund Schermerhorn, its proportions are modest by Newport standards. That’s because Chepstow does elegance like a quiet dinner party instead of a bacchanalian blowout. A later update by architect Dudley Newton added refinement to its clean symmetry.
Think broad overhanging eaves, decorative brackets that could hold up the ego of a Vanderbilt, and tall, narrow windows. Chepstow stayed in its groove, holding court as a Schermerhorn summer haunt before being sold in 1911 to Emily Lorillard Gallatin, whose family pedigree ran deep enough to have its own zip code. The Morris and Gallatin names imbue Chepstow with the sort of collected calm you’d expect from families who summered with the Mrs. Astor.
Inside, the house lives large despite its modest footprint. Its rooms feature art by Fitz Hugh Lane and Granville Perkins and furniture that includes a walnut Queen Anne chair reportedly owned by William Penn. The Preservation Society opened Chepstow to the public in 1998, where it now plays the role of a dignified elder statesman among Newport’s Gilded Age showstoppers.
7. Marble House
This is where things get decadent. Marble House, completed in 1892, was Alva Vanderbilt’s architectural mic drop on Bellevue Avenue. Built with $11 million worth of audacity — $7 million of it in marble — it’s less a house design and more architectural manifesto. Richard Morris Hunt conjured up a temple to power, loosely channeling the Petit Trianon. Corinthian columns sprout like gilded sentinels, framing a portico that looks like it’s daring the White House to step up.
The French Neo-Classical facade features Corinthian pilasters, monumental arched windows, and a curved carriage ramp leading to grotesque-mouthed fountains that spit water with imperial disdain. Step inside, and you’re slapped by marble at every turn: yellow Siena in the stair hall, pink Numidian in the dining room, with gilded accents that gleam like Alva’s self-confidence. The Grand Salon drips Louis XIV extravagance with green velvet panels and mythological gold carvings.
6. Rough Point
Completed in 1892 as a summer cottage for Frederick W. Vanderbilt, Rough Point combines Richardsonian Romanesque with a rough-hewn cliffside presence. Later owned by Doris Duke, America’s most eclectic heiress, the mansion became part museum, part time capsule. Gothic details meet plush furnishings and Duke’s personal touch — think priceless antiques alongside leopard-print upholstery.
Vanderbilt’s idea of a cottage included stables, sprawling lawns, and enough granite to fortify a small kingdom. The original gardens were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm.
By 1922, the Duke family — James, Nanaline, and 12-year-old Doris — added their signature to Rough Point. Architect Horace Trumbauer expanded the house with his trademark seamless luxury. Inside, a mix of opulence and eccentricity reigned including Gainsboroughs and Renoirs sharing wall space with JC Penney curtains.
5. The Elms
The Elms is Horace Trumbauer’s masterclass in French-inspired precision, standing proud at 367 Bellevue Avenue like it was dropped there straight from the Château d’Asnières. Commissioned in 1899 by Edward Julius Berwind, coal baron and self-styled ruler of America’s smokestacks, The Elms cost $1.5 million to build, a small price for a 1901 mansion that could outshine the royal houses it imitated. Clad in limestone and built with fireproof materials, it was wired for electricity without a single candle in sight.
The interiors unfold like a who’s-who of 18th-century French design: marble floors, gilded salons, and a conservatory spilling over with palms. A grand staircase leads from ballroom to sunken garden.
Outside, the grounds rival the house itself. C.H. Miller and E.W. Bowditch crafted lush formal gardens dripping in French order, while weeping beeches now stand in for the lost elms. And for those grand carriages replaced by clumsy automobiles, Berwind installed a rotating garage turntable.
4. Rosecliff
If mansions were judged by their party-throwing capabilities, Rosecliff would win. Built between 1898 and 1902 for silver heiress Theresa Fair Oelrichs, Rosecliff channels the Grand Trianon with white terracotta cladding, a splash of Old World pomp, and all the flourishes you’d expect from McKim, Mead & White on a French kick. Architect Stanforf White kept the façade crisp and symmetrical but threw in Newport-sized surprises, like a heart-shaped grand staircase that curls upward as if choreographed for a debutante’s descent.
Inside, the ballroom reigns supreme. At 40 by 80 feet, it’s the largest in Newport, an unapologetically gilded expanse of Corinthian pilasters and mirrored arches. This was Theresa’s stage for her legendary Bal Blanc of 1904 — everything white, silver, and sparkling under the weight of a hundred diamonds. The northern wing houses a dining room and billiard room, while the southern vestibule flirts with Baroque elegance.
3. Belcourt
Part Gothic manor, part carriage house on steroids, Belcourt is a monument to eccentricity. Newport’s eccentric outlier, doesn’t just dabble in styles, it hoards them. Built in 1894 for Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the flamboyant heir to a banking fortune, it’s what happens when a man obsesses equally over French châteaux and his prized steeds. Architect Richard Morris Hunt, no stranger to Gilded Age excess, reluctantly agreed to Belmont’s oddball vision — a 50,000-square-foot ode to horses disguised as a Louis XIII hunting lodge.
The ground floor was pure Belmont logic featuring massive arched doors opening into a grand hall where Belmont’s horses were treated like four-legged aristocrats. Upstairs, the living spaces leaned heavily into French Renaissance fantasy: dark oak paneling, carved staircases, and Gothic windows dripping with stained glass.
Outside, Hunt crafted a façade that bridged equestrian grandeur and architectural theatrics. The steep mansard roof pierced by oval dormers was pure Versailles, while the central courtyard felt medieval.
2. Chateau-sur-Mer
Before the Vanderbilts rolled into town, Chateau-sur-Mer was Newport’s undisputed king. Built in 1852 as an Italianate villa by Seth Bradford, this was Newport’s first attempt at architectural one-upmanship. But it didn’t just whisper wealth; it shouted it through rusticated stone walls, massive scale, and a sprawling lawn that seemed to roll all the way to eternity.
Then George Peabody Wetmore took over, married money, and left for Europe leaving Richard Morris Hunt to put his stamp on things. By the 1870s, Hunt had reimagined the house as a French Second Empire chateau. He tacked on a three-story wing, topped it with a towering mansard roof, and threw in a porte-cochère.
Inside, the great hall soared 45 feet high. The billiard room’s Eastlake style made oak beams look fashionable, while an Italianate library, disassembled in Italy and shipped like precious cargo, proved the Wetmores’ commitment to European flair. Even the dining room Renaissance-revived its way across the Atlantic.
Unlike other Newport cottages, this one was built for year-round living. Chateau-sur-Mer stood stoic through decades of flashy neighbors and remains Newport’s original declaration of old-money dominance.
1. The Breakers
The Breakers, completed in 1895 for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, isn’t subtle — it’s 138,000 square feet of Renaissance Revival grandeur perched over the Atlantic. Architect Richard Morris Hunt kept things fireproof and monumental: steel trusses, limestone cladding, and not a wooden beam in sight. The mansion’s footprint covers a full acre of the 14-acre estate with a Baroque iron gates and limestone fence.
Inside, Hunt and decorator Jules Allard went heavy on imported materials. The central Great Hall soars 50 feet high with limestone pilasters framing arched doorways and allegorical figures looking down from above. The dining room, with its rose alabaster Corinthian columns and carved gilt cornices, is a showpiece of Roman-inspired formality. The library combines Circassian walnut with embossed Spanish leather, while the Morning Room lightens the tone with platinum-leaf panels depicting the muses.
Beneath the extravagance is function. The first-floor kitchen kept heat and smells away from the main living spaces. Upstairs, family bedrooms flow with Codman-designed Louis XIV style, while a labyrinth of third-floor servant quarters fits neatly under the Italianate pitched roof. This is Hunt’s Beaux-Arts mastery at work — ornate, imposing, and built to make Newport’s cliffs seem a little less impressive.
Now 10 of the Grandest Old Hollywood Mansions
Hollywood’s historic mansions emerged during the film industry’s Golden Age (1920s-1950s) as movie stars, directors, and studio executives built lavish estates to showcase their newfound wealth and status. These properties, concentrated in areas like Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Hollywood Hills, combined architectural styles ranging from Tudor to Mediterranean Revival and served as both private retreats and venues for legendary industry parties. The mansions became symbols of Hollywood success, with their opulent designs and expansive grounds reflecting the glamour and excess of the studio system era.
10. Pickfair
Before Beverly Hills was a zip code, Pickfair was its crown jewel. Built in 1919 as a hunting lodge, it was transformed into a Tudor Revival wonder by architect Wallace Neff when Douglas Fairbanks bought it for Mary Pickford, his equally regal bride. Neff dressed the place in full Tudor Revival regalia with steep-pitched gables, timbered beams, gold-leaf niches, and mahogany-panel walls that seemed to sneer at anyone with less than two Oscars.
The transformation sprawled into a 25-room, four-story mansion complete with a Louis XVI guest wing fit for dukes and duchesses — actual ones, not just the Hollywood kind. Inside, Neff’s interiors flirted with Renaissance palazzos featuring ceiling frescos in every direction, parquet floors, and Old World furniture. The pièce de résistance was Los Angeles’ first in-ground pool, where Fairbanks and Pickford famously floated a canoe as if life itself was performance art.
Outside, Neff landscaped 18 acres of grandeur, studded with tennis courts, stables, and gardens. By the time Pickfair hosted Einstein, Amelia Earhart, and Charlie Chaplin, the architecture had upstaged the guests.
After Pickford’s death in 1979, the house fell into disrepair and was eventually bulldozed. Today, only the gates remain, an iron obituary for the mansion that made Hollywood believe in its own magic.
9. Greystone Mansion
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Greystone Mansion, sprawled across 16 prime acres in Beverly Hills, feels like a Tudor manor air-dropped straight from England. Edward Doheny Sr., oil baron and Teapot Dome scandal poster boy, built the 46,000-square-foot stunner in 1928 as a gift for his son, Ned Doheny Jr., who tragically never got to enjoy it. Just four months after moving in, Ned met his end in a grim murder-suicide with his secretary, Hugh Plunkett.
Gordon Kaufmann, L.A.’s go-to architect, orchestrated the mansion’s brooding splendor featuring steep gabled roofs and Indiana limestone façades. Inside, Greystone flaunts 55 rooms dripping in old-world opulence: a grand hall with vaulted ceilings, a marble checkerboard foyer, and a ballroom straight out of The Great Gatsby. Outside, formal English gardens spill across terraces, while a stone path winds to the iconic pool and two-lane bowling alley.
By the 1960s, Greystone risked the wrecking ball before Beverly Hills swooped in, turning the estate into a public park. Dozens of films, television shows and music videos have been filmed here over the years. The home’s Gothic vibe is the ultimate Hollywood set with its sweeping staircase stealing scenes in The Big Lebowski, Spider-Man, and There Will Be Blood to name a few productions. Beneath the grandeur, Greystone remains the ultimate L.A. paradox: a monument to power, money, and the human drama it can’t quite hide.
8. Falcon Lair
Rudolph Valentino’s Falcon Lair crowned the rugged Benedict Canyon hills in 1925, a Spanish Revival hideaway where the silent film star could play out his desert prince fantasies. It was no modest escape. Valentino poured $175,000 into the estate, surrounding himself with antiques, Arabian-inspired décor, and stables for his prized horses. His unproduced film The Hooded Falcon gave the mansion its name, but divorce with Natacha Rambova and his death a year later left Falcon Lair more elegy than escape.
Then came the stories. Weird noises, strange lights, ghostly happenings as Falcon Lair’s haunted reputation grew. Harry Carey, a later tenant, traced glowing lights to séance wiring in the basement, rigged by a spiritualist caretaker hoping to conjure Valentino’s spirit. Hidden doors revealed bats and mysteries, while friends decided Carey was better suited to the open range than ghost hunting in Hollywood.
Doris Duke arrived in the 1950s, jazz in tow. The tobacco heiress and her companion Joe Castro turned the canyon estate into a music lover’s Eden, hosting intimate concerts where bebop legends jammed under the stars. By the time Duke’s life took its darker turn, Falcon Lair became a gilded winter fortress, her California refuge growing as isolated as its surroundings.
The main house was bulldozed in 2006, its hilltop plot cleared for bigger dreams, yet Falcon Lair refuses to vanish. Its legends cling like canyon mist — Valentino’s untimely glamour, Duke’s eccentric grace, and the ghosts of old Hollywood who refuse to leave quietly.
7. Howard Hughes Mansion
Long before Howard Hughes barricaded himself in a Vegas penthouse surrounded by Kleenex boxes, he prowled this Spanish Revival stunner like a king with unfinished business. Built in 1926 by Roland E. Coate, the mansion curls elegantly around its cobblestone courtyard. Hughes rented the place in 1929, back when Hancock Park was Hollywood royalty’s playground — Clark Gable, Mae West, and Nat King Cole lived close enough to hear the dinner bell.
Aesthetically, the mansion pulls from old-world Spain with its arched doorways, red-clay roof tiles, and wood-beamed ceilings. It’s a house that could host both a champagne-soaked Ava Gardner soirée and Hughes brooding alone in the family room, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The chef’s kitchen, with its brass countertops and gold tile, is a glinting sunburst of old-meets-bold. Big windows frame views of Wilshire Country Club’s 8th green, the Hollywood Hills, and the famous sign — silent reminders that this home sits in the beating heart of Golden Age Los Angeles.
Hughes’s Hollywood connections walked its halls — Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, maybe a poker-faced Cary Grant plotting the next movie deal. Today, the eight-bedroom masterpiece sprawls across nearly an acre with a custom pizza oven, citrus trees, and a pool that Hughes surely ignored.
6. Harold Lloyd Estate
Greenacres, Harold Lloyd’s sprawling Benedict Canyon estate, is the architectural embodiment of 1920s Hollywood opulence with a touch of “let’s just build a little more.” Designed by Sumner Spaulding and completed in 1928, the 44-room, 45,000-square-foot villa mixes Mediterranean Revival and Italian Renaissance styles. Villa Palmieri in Florence served as its muse, but this estate trades old-world restraint for something far grander, much like its comedian-owner.
Landscape architect A.E. Hanson sculpted the estate’s 15 acres into a lush dreamscape of cascading fountains, formal gardens, and California excess. A 900-foot trout-stocked canoe stream winds through the property. The pool, 50 by 150 feet, featured underwater viewing tunnels.
A 120-foot entrance court leads into a space where Italian carved stone, vaulted ceilings, and understated grandeur meet the indulgences of handball courts and hidden film vaults. Greenacres was Lloyd’s Hollywood stage – a place where the Golden Age was lived, not just filmed.
5. Hearst Castle
Hearst Castle is what happens when a media mogul with bottomless pockets hands his wildest architectural dreams to Julia Morgan, America’s first great female architect. Perched atop San Simeon’s hills with Pacific vistas that stretch forever, this sprawling 165-room Mediterranean-Baroque mashup is equal parts Renaissance palace, Spanish cathedral, and silver screen excess. William Randolph Hearst called it “a little something more comfortable” than the tents of his youth, but subtlety was never in his vocabulary.
For 28 years, Morgan meticulously indulged Hearst’s whims, while he shipped entire ceilings, doorways, and tapestries from Europe like they were souvenirs. Casa Grande, the main house, rises like a cathedral, its twin bell towers inspired by Spain’s Santa María la Mayor. Rooms inside are swathed in carved wood, Italian marble, and ceilings plucked from 16th-century palazzos.
Hearst shared his palatial digs with actress Marion Davies, his mistress and unofficial hostess. She brought Hollywood’s A-list – Chaplin, Gable, Garbo – for boozy weekends of tennis, pool parties, and evenings in the private theater. By day, guests swam in the Neptune Pool, ringed by Roman temples, or lounged in the blue-and-gold splendor of the indoor Roman Pool, mosaicked to perfection. The castle was Tinseltown’s most exclusive playground, where Hollywood royalty held court.
4. Buster Keaton’s Italian Villa
Leave it to Buster Keaton to live in a house that could pull off as many tricks as he could. In 1924, the silent film genius erected his Italian Renaissance-inspired villa on 3.5 acres in Beverly Hills, a stone’s throw from the Beverly Hills Hotel. Though architect Gene Verge gets official credit, it was perfectionist Keaton who shaped the sprawling white stucco masterpiece with its swooping red-tile roof and intricate carved-stone details.
The central entrance, framed by a second-floor balcony, opens into a checkerboard-tiled vestibule featuring a flower-studded fountain. The sunlit living room spills onto a loggia overlooking the grounds featuring Roman-bath-inspired pools, aviaries, and palm-lined driveways. The “Play Room” came complete with a hidden bar, pool table, and a projection screen — Keaton’s man cave for poker nights and impromptu screenings. A mechanized trout stream, engineered to flick on with the push of a button, coursed through the gardens.
The second floor had a gilded gate from a Spanish palace defining husband and wife wings with Keaton’s suite separated from Natalie Talmadge’s sprawling wardrobe room and gilded pink-tiled bathroom. The villa was Keaton’s pride and joy and played a starring role in his 1931 MGM film Parlor, Bedroom and Bath.
3. W.C. Fields Mansion
W.C. Fields’ Hollywood bachelor pad, an 8,000-square-foot Italianate gem in Laughlin Park, is a study in Beaux-Arts elegance with just enough quirks to match its most eccentric tenant. Designed in 1920 by William M. Clarke, the home balances grand proportions and intricate details: mahogany paneling salvaged from a Spanish monastery, graceful archways, and fireplaces displaying Old World charm.
Fields, a self-proclaimed renter-for-life, set up camp here in 1940, famously installing a bowling alley in the living room but skipping the furniture. French doors lead to wide terraces that dissolve the line between indoors and out.
The grounds, rumored to be Lloyd Wright’s work, continue the drama with thick hedges, sun-drenched lawns, and a pool tucked into the greenery like an old Hollywood movie set. History drips from this house like vintage brandy, yet its elegance remains timeless, a fitting tribute to both the Italianate design and W.C. Fields’ particular brand of eccentric luxury.
2. Greta Garbo Mansion
Greta Garbo never stuck around long whether it was Hollywood parties, film sets, or homes. In 1937, she took up residence in this Beverly Hills house, perched on a steep hillside in the Crest Streets. It was a place of curves with the front façade arcing in a perfect sweep to the winding road below.
Since Garbo slept here the house has been thoroughly modernized, first by HGTV-featured designer Nicole Sassaman in the early 2000s. The three-story, 4,700-square-foot home now favors glass, views, and angles. Sliding doors blur the line between living room and infinity-edge pool. The pool itself hugs the back of the house, dangling like a water feature above canyon views that spill all the way to the city skyline.
Inside, the bones remain practical and luxurious: five bedrooms, slick fireplaces, and balconies that make the most of the hillside setting. Below the pool, grassy terraces and an alfresco lounge shielded by foliage nod to Garbo’s legendary need for maximum privacy.
1. Cecil B. DeMille Mansion
Cecil B. DeMille’s Los Feliz mansion, built in 1913, carries the kind of unassuming grandeur that only early Hollywood could muster. The classical-style home sits comfortably on two landscaped acres in the Laughlin Park enclave. DeMille, the king of epic cinema, lived here for 40 years.
The house itself is all about balance and proportion. French doors punctuate clean, arched lines, and delicate moldings trim rooms without fuss. Wood paneling in the dining room and a formal foyer ground the home with sturdy elegance. At 11,000 square feet, it’s impressive but avoids feeling cavernous. Four fireplaces warm scaled rooms that were clearly designed for living rather than showing off.
Concrete steps spill through tiered gardens dotted with specimen trees and fountains, leading to a classic rectangular pool and a modest pool house. Even the guesthouse keeps a low profile, tucking itself neatly into the property.
DeMille, master of on-screen spectacle, found something timeless here: architecture built to last, comfortable in its own skin, and quietly magnificent without needing a close-up.
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