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Railroad baron William K. Vanderbilt spared no expense when he built a house for his wife's birthday at a cost $11 million, $7 million of which paid for 500,000 cubic feet of white marble.

The architect, Richard Morris Hunt, was a master of Beaux Arts. His other projects include the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Yorktown Monument. For Vanderbilt's Marble House, Richard Morris Hunt drew inspiration from some of world's most majestic architecture: the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis (upon which Marble House's four Corinthian columns were modeled), the Petit Trianon at Versailles, the White House, and the Temple of Apollo.

Marble House is a palace that set the precedent for the Gilded Age, Newport's transformation from a sleepy summer colony of small wooden cottages to a legendary resort of stone mansions.