The French Château Hiding in Newport: When America’s Gilded Age Fell in Love with France

Newport has never been a city that apologizes for grandeur. Along Bellevue Avenue, the “summer cottages” of America’s Gilded Age rise like architectural declarations from families whose fortunes were new but whose ambitions were anything but modest. Marble, limestone, ballrooms, imported paintings and European pedigrees were assembled on the Rhode Island coast with astonishing confidence. Yet among Newport’s celebrated mansions, The Elms tells an especially revealing story. It is not simply a beautiful house influenced by France. It is a portrait of what happened when America’s industrial elite looked across the Atlantic and decided that French aristocratic elegance could be reimagined as an American ideal.

Completed in 1901 as the summer residence of coal magnate Edward Julius Berwind and his wife, Herminie, The Elms was designed by Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer, one of the leading architects of the American Gilded Age. Its inspiration was the 18th-century Château d’Asnières, outside Paris. The connection was deliberate. The Preservation Society of Newport County notes that French art, architecture and design profoundly influenced Newport’s elite, who looked toward the French aristocracy for models of cultivated living. The Elms belonged to a larger Francophile landscape: Marble House drew inspiration from the Petit Trianon at Versailles, while elements of Rosecliff recalled the Grand Trianon. 

At The Elms, however, France went well beyond the façade. The interiors and furnishings were entrusted to Allard and Sons of Paris, and the Berwinds filled the residence with Renaissance ceramics, 18th-century French and Venetian paintings, Oriental jades, statuary and tapestries. Outside, the estate continued the performance. Elaborate Classical Revival gardens developed between 1907 and 1914 incorporated terraces, marble and bronze sculpture, fountains, pavilions, specimen trees and a sunken garden. It was Newport by way of Paris; but interpreted on a scale possible only through the fortunes of industrial America. 

The temptation is to dismiss all of this as imitation: newly rich Americans borrowing the architectural vocabulary of an older Europe in search of instant legitimacy. But The Elms becomes far more interesting when viewed as something more complicated. Newport’s great houses were not replicas of European aristocratic life. They were American reinterpretations of it. Behind The Elms’ 18th-century French appearance was some of the most sophisticated domestic technology available at the beginning of the 20th century. The Preservation Society emphasizes precisely this juxtaposition: the mansion was modeled after a French château while incorporating the latest technology of the Gilded Age. 

That contradiction is the house’s real fascination. Old World appearance, New World machinery. Aristocratic aesthetics, industrial money. The wealth that paid for this French fantasy came from coal; the fuel powering America’s extraordinary industrial expansion. Berwind’s fortune belonged not to the inherited European world his mansion evoked but to the modern American economy rapidly transforming cities, transportation, manufacturing and everyday life. The Elms therefore looks backward and forward at the same time. 

And then there was the invisible architecture of service. A house of this magnitude did not function through marble and chandeliers alone. Behind its polished public rooms existed the labor required to sustain the Berwinds’ version of effortless elegance. The estate’s surviving service spaces and the long-running Servant Life Tour have allowed visitors to see the mansion from another perspective: not simply through the people who owned it, but through those whose work made its elaborate rituals possible. That dimension matters because the Gilded Age is far less interesting when told only through fortunes. Its great houses were miniature social systems, separating owners, guests and workers while depending intimately upon all three. The Servant Life Tour continues through August 31 even while the main mansion is temporarily closed. 

The family story eventually gave way to the familiar vulnerability of America’s great estates. Herminie Berwind died in 1922. Edward then asked his sister Julia Berwind to serve as hostess at his Newport and New York residences. After Edward’s death in 1936, Julia continued spending summers at The Elms until her death in 1961. The house and much of its contents were subsequently sold at public auction; a moment when this extraordinary survivor of the Gilded Age might easily have disappeared. The Preservation Society of Newport County acquired The Elms in 1962 and opened it to the public. In 1996, it was designated a National Historic Landmark. 

Now The Elms is undergoing another transformation. Beginning August 10, 2026, the mansion closed to general public visitation for several weeks while the Preservation Society prepares what it calls The Elms Experience, scheduled to arrive in fall 2026. The organization says the new interpretation will incorporate engaging storytelling, immersive elements and other integrated enhancements intended to give visitors a different way of connecting with the mansion. The Servant Life Tour remains available through August 31, and the Carriage House café remains open under specified access conditions during the closure. Because a precise reopening date for the main house has not yet been announced on the current visitor information, travelers should check the official schedule before making plans. 

The change comes at an interesting moment for historic-house museums. Beauty alone is no longer enough. The chandeliers, gardens and French interiors may bring visitors through the door, but the larger challenge is to explain what these places reveal about the societies that created them. Who built the fortunes? Who designed the rooms? Who maintained them? Why did wealthy Americans so often look to France when deciding what sophistication should look like? And what did it mean for a generation whose wealth came from a rapidly industrializing democracy to surround itself with the architectural language of European aristocracy?

For FQM, that last question makes The Elms particularly compelling. France’s influence on Newport was not superficial decoration. The Preservation Society itself has examined how French architecture, art, interiors and even cuisine permeated Gilded Age society. Newport’s American elite borrowed from France because France represented something they desired: history, refinement, craftsmanship and the impression that elegance could transcend time. 

Yet America changed what it borrowed. The Elms may have looked toward an 18th-century château outside Paris, but the world inside it belonged to turn-of-the-century America; to industrial fortunes, technological confidence, elaborate systems of domestic labor and a new class testing how wealth might translate into cultural authority.

That is why The Elms deserves to be seen as more than another beautiful Newport mansion. It is an architectural conversation between two countries and two ideas of status: France supplied much of the aesthetic vocabulary; America rewrote it in the language of the Gilded Age.

For French visitors, there is a certain pleasure in discovering how dramatically America once imagined France. For Americans, there is something more revealing: an opportunity to see a period when the country was becoming enormously powerful and yet still looked across the Atlantic for an image of what refinement might mean.

More than a century later, the fountains remain, the gardens have been restored, and the château still stands on Bellevue Avenue. But look beyond the French façade and The Elms tells a distinctly American story; about aspiration, reinvention and the enduring temptation to build permanence out of new money. 

Sources

• Preservation Society of Newport County / Newport Mansions — The Elms: History 

• Preservation Society of Newport County / Newport Mansions — The Elms visitor information 

• Preservation Society of Newport County — The French Influence in Newport 

• Newport Mansions — 2026 visitor and operating information