Inside the marble house, a Gilded Age Vanderbilt mansion

• The Marble House was completed in 1892 as a summer home for William K. Vanderbilt and Alva Vanderbilt.
• Built with half a million cubic meters of marble, it has 50 rooms and covers 140,000 square meters.
• Scenes from the HBO show “The Gilded Age” were filmed in the historic Rhode Island home.

Alva Vanderbilt’s 39-year-old gift 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 to build the Marble House for his wife. It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the same architect who worked on The Breakers, another sprawling Newport mansion. It cost about $11 million to build in 1892, or about $380 million in today’s dollars. The house’s 500,000 cubic meters of marble alone cost about $7 million, or about $241 million today.