Barbara Hayes

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...

There are food festivals, and then there are food festivals held in a ballroom conceived for one of the most celebrated hostesses of America’s Gilded Age. At Rosecliff, the distinction matters. Here, wine is poured beneath chandeliers, chefs serve dinner in a room designed for spectacle, and beyond the terrace lies the Atlantic. The setting does not merely accommodate the Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival. It becomes one of its ingredients. From September 18–20, 2026, the 21st annual...

At the end of a long private drive in Huntington, on Long Island’s celebrated Gold Coast, OHEKA Castle rises above its formal gardens with the improbable authority of a French château transported across the Atlantic. Its steep slate roofs, pale limestone walls, monumental staircase and disciplined garden axis suggest inherited European aristocracy. Yet OHEKA is unmistakably American; not because it rejects Europe, but because it transforms European grandeur into a story of ambition,...