Sophie Girard’s family has been in Newport, R.I., for what she estimates is 17 generations. She’s a direct descendant of Roger Williams—who founded Providence, the state’s capital, in 1636—and, more recently, of Nicholas Brown, after whom Brown University is named.

One of the primary heiresses in the family at the turn of the 20th century had “as much as $80 million,” Girard says, pointing out that it was “not a lot, compared to the Vanderbilts.”

It wasn’t until relatively recently—1895, a mere 123 years ago—that Girard’s great-great uncle Harold Brown built a 13,962-square-foot vacation house on Bellevue Avenue in Newport with his wife Georgette. (Harold was Nicholas’s grandson and a member of Ward McAllister’s “Four Hundred” grouping of top society in New York.)

The 25-room house has a Gilded Age pedigree that would make Edith Wharton jealous. It was designed by Dudley Newton, one of Newport’s most prolific architects during the area’s heyday; its landscaping was done by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted (co-designer of New York’s Central and Prospect parks); and its interiors were designed by Ogden Codman, who co-wrote a book on interior decoration with Edith Wharton.

Napoleon’s Bed
Though the exterior of the home is apparently designed in a “Norman hunting style,” its interior was inspired, Girard says, by her ancestors’ honeymoon trip to Paris. “They fell in love with the Empire style,” she says, referring to an aesthetic developed during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. “They collected furniture from the period and even bought a set once owned by Napoleon.”

Codman duly designed the rest of the interior to match the bedroom set (which Girard says was donated to the Rhode Island School of Design “years ago”), and the rest of the house remained unchanged until Georgette’s death in 1958.

At that point, the house was purchased from Georgette’s estate by her niece, Eileen Slocum, a socialite and a major force in Republican politics. Slocum and her husband John (a foreign service officer whose collection of James Joyce manuscripts and editions is now part of Yale’s rare books library), bought the house for about $85,000.

“When she moved in,” Girard says, “she did virtually nothing—a minor update or two in the bathrooms, and she did redo the kitchen, which we think is tragic. It had been very dark wood, and they redid it in all white.”

Other than that, though, the house’s interior remains unchanged and remarkably well-preserved, thanks in part to the continuous presence of a live-in staff.

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