Last week, two friends and I escaped for a girls’ weekend in Newport, Rhode Island. It included Gilded Age mansions, a dramatic coastal walk, beaches, a flower show, and more seafood and cookies than I’d like to admit. Newport, it turns out, is an absolutely perfect setting for a few days away with your closest friends.
Here’s how the weekend went, mansion by mansion, meal by meal.
A Kilted Send-Off in Boston
We flew into and out of Boston, and our first day there happened to coincide with the Scotland vs. Morocco World Cup match. The entire city seemed dressed up for it. If I had a dollar for every man (and some women) in a kilt and Scotland soccer jersey, I’d have paid for my trip by now!
The best evidence of the day’s Scottish-induced chaos was that the beloved Make Way for Ducklings statues in the Boston Public Garden had all been outfitted with traffic cones on their heads, presumably the work of Scotland fans who had covered almost every statue in Boston with an orange traffic cone the night before.
We walked through the Boston Public Gardens up to A Sanctuary Cat Cafe and the cutest bookshop I’ve ever seen, Beacon Hill Books & Cafe. The cat cafe had great treats and drinks, but the cats were not as friendly as mine at home. It also had one of the longest waiver documents I’ve ever seen. Apparently way more can go wrong when you enter a cat cafe than when you take two teenagers out on a lake on paddle boards, who would have thought? That being said, I’d still recommend the cat cafe and definitely the bookstore.
Before we left the city, we also stopped at a beautiful Tatte for a mid-morning treat, and I was excited to find a mini-pavlova, one of my favorite desserts. It was not as good as those in New Zealand, but it was pretty good.
The Breakers & A Family that Inspired the Term “Conspicuous Consumption”
Our first mansion in Newport was The Breakers, the summer “cottage” of Cornelius & Alice Vanderbilt. Walking into the Great Hall feels like walking into a Versailles-level European palace with soaring gilded ceilings, an enormous staircase, and chandeliers the size of small cars.
The dining room was, if anything, even more over-the-top: crimson curtains, marble columns, and crystal chandeliers dripping over a table set for an extravagant dinner party that, as far as I can tell, was the Vanderbilts’ idea of a normal Tuesday.
The Breakers is jaw-dropping. It is also, in a way, exactly what you’d expect a Gilded Age mansion to be: aggressively grand. Just down the street, another Vanderbilt, Cornelius’ brother, William and his wife Alva, seemed to have a little competition going around whose house could be the most outrageous. Read on to learn about The Marble House.
Rosecliff: My Favorite Mansion of the Trip
Rosecliff was the surprise of the trip, and it ended up being my favorite of the three mansions by a wide margin. The architecture itself is more restrained than The Breakers and Marble House, though “restrained” is a relative term when you’re talking about a mansion modeled after the Grand Trianon at Versailles. It has an elegance and lightness to it that the other two don’t, with soft cream tones, a ballroom that practically glows, and proportions that feel grand without being suffocating.
We happened to visit during a flower show, and the timing could not have been better. The ballroom was filled with elaborate floral installations, and the contrast between the soft architecture and the bold, colorful arrangements was stunning.
Outside, the back lawn looks straight out over the ocean, and the flower show had spilled out into a series of tents around the famous Rosecliff fountain. Sun, sea breeze, and flowers everywhere created the kind of moment you want to just stand in for a while.
If you only have time for one mansion in Newport, my vote goes to Rosecliff.
The Marble House and Afternoon Tea at the Chinese Tea House
The Marble House lives up to its name as every room in the mansion seemed to include copious amounts of marble. It’s somehow even more ornate than The Breakers in places. The dining room ceiling alone, with its gilded moldings and walls of red marble, was over-the-top. And so it continued throughout the house.
But the real highlight of our visit to The Marble House was tea at the Chinese Tea House, perched right at the edge of the property overlooking the water. It’s a striking little building of vivid red and green, with a sweeping tiled roof that makes you feel like you’ve just walked from Austria straight over to China.
The view from the tea house is one of the best in Newport with water stretching out in front of you while you sip tea from a thoughtful (and large) menu. Our waiter was warm and unhurried (and a little flirty, I might add), which made the whole experience feel like a proper pause in the middle of an otherwise packed day of mansion-hopping. If you do nothing else extra in Newport, build in time for tea here.
A Note About Alva Vanderbilt
All of these mansions have audio guides that you can get by downloading the Newport Preservation Society app. The story of the Marble House was especially interesting because William built this house as a 39th birthday present for his wife, Alva, who picked out everything down to the ornate designs in her daughter’s room. A few years later, he also bought her the Chinese Tea House for another birthday (I mean, how can you top The Marble House, anyway?).
And then, she left him. Alva’s divorce from her ultra-rich husband was a high-profile, highly surprising divorce. She did it to empower other women to leave bad husbands, women in loveless marriages, of which, I suspect, there were a great many, just as there are today. She turned her attention to women’s suffrage and held suffrage conferences in the Tea House, while the Marble House, an item she won in the divorce, sat empty, accumulating her stuff like an oversized, over-decorated closet. I don’t know whether to think of her as fickle or a badass, but the truth is, her money helped a great deal in getting women the right to vote, so I am extremely grateful.
The Cliff Walk: My Favorite Part of the Whole Weekend
If the mansions were the trip’s grand spectacle, the Cliff Walk was its soul and it ended up being my favorite part of the weekend.
The Cliff Walk is a 3.5-mile public path that runs along the Newport coastline, with the mansions on one side and dramatic ocean views on the other. Wild roses grow right up to the edge of the rocky cliffs in places, and the views are some of the most stunning coastal scenery I’ve experienced on the East Coast.
Parts of the walk are a smooth, paved path right along the water where even strollers can roll, with mansions visible in the distance.
And then, toward the more rugged southern end, the path stops being a path altogether and turns into rock scrambling with the ocean crashing below. If you go, wear shoes you can actually walk and scramble in, not sandals.
I returned at sunrise for a run, and the light over the water and lack of people at that hour was truly amazing (see above)!
The Food: Chowder, Lobster Rolls, and a View to Match
No trip to Newport is complete without serious seafood, and we did not hold back.
We had chowder at The Black Pearl, a Newport institution, and it was delicious. For lunch the next day, we went to The Mooring Seafood Kitchen & Bar for a lobster roll with a view of the harbor that rivaled the food itself.
No trip is complete without great food and drinks and I will say that Newport delivered day in and day out!
Why Newport Is a Perfect Girls’ Weekend
A few days later, here’s what stands out: Newport packs an enormous amount of variety into a small, walkable area. You can do culture & history (the mansions), nature & adventure (the Cliff Walk), and pure indulgence (the food, the tea, the drinks) all within a few miles of each other, which makes it ideal for a group of friends who might not all want to do the exact same thing every hour of every day.
It’s also just plain beautiful. Through coastline, gardens, architecture, and light, Newport gives you something gorgeous to look at constantly, and that matters more for a relaxing trip than people sometimes realize.
If you’re thinking about planning a trip with your friends, Newport may be a great place to consider. Bring good walking shoes, leave room for seafood, and don’t skip the Cliff Walk.
Have you been to Newport? I’d love to hear your favorite mansion or stop in the comments.
