Oceanfront Newport Mansion with Beautiful Gardens

hi i'm victoria mealy welcome to newport i can't wait to show you around my home and introduce you to my family my parents owned this entire property they bought it in 1952 and after my father died my mother sold land's end in 1957 and moved over here to what was the gardener's cottage this was still an eight-car garage and then in 1968 she attached the two houses my husband and i bought land's end back in 1989 from the people who had it then and we lived there for 30 years and when she passed away in 2018 we sold that house and moved over here this house and especially this room is a little bit of a mishmash of her things my things from next door and every house i've ever lived in so it's quite an eclectic collection i'm nick miele i'm her favorite son i'm a professional photographer and i've grown up coming here my entire life and now i get to bring my wife and two kids here to enjoy newport and to make his mother crazy i have a new book out uh called the newport summer it is a coffee table book available everywhere and it's kind of 20 years of me photographing here over the summers people parties houses details lifestyle everything uh dogs um like my beautiful dog lola here and it's a kind of um slim aaron's ask a summer in newport really june july august september my mother marion oates lighter charles was one of the grand doms of newport people called her otzie and she made everyone feel uh like they were the only one in the room she did you know which is one of her her many talents she was brought up to mainly probably because she was from the south she was brought up to entertain and amuse and you know and be smart and be able to talk on a great variety of subjects she was great friends with jack kennedy with nancy reagan the list goes on and on she sat next to prince charles at a dinner oh she told him he was a hell of a prince at the end of the dinner he absolutely loved her she had incredible wit and would say anything to anyone and people sort of just flocked to her and she was very big on the social scene in washington for many years knew all the presidents and all the politicians and and led sort of a fascinating life i mean she once said to me you realize you grew up knowing people that other people only read about in books and that was true she was a very um a very interesting person i was scared of her for the majority of my childhood she wasn't you know very child friendly it wasn't until i hit college and in my 20s that i really got to appreciate her and she also taught me that you can get really far with a good sense of humor and being charming um you know it's kind of like that oscar wilde quote it's ridiculous to divide people into good or bad people are either charming or tedious it's always been my philosophy i i guess i guess i'm an intellectual snob i don't really care where you came from or what you do as long as you're interesting this was an eight-car garage where we're standing right now and the other side of the house which you'll see later was the gardener's cottage in 68 she connected the two houses and she turned this part into the library office and this living room the main furniture was hers except for these two wonderful black lacquer pieces i have a thing about stuffed birds which i absolutely love and i bought those peacocks at an auction here in newport and ordered some plastic greenery from amazon and stuck them in those stands and attached everything so all these pictures on either side of the fireplace were our collection of interiors of places we've lived the bottom one was my living room in washington the middle one my living room next door atlanta's end and the top one was her library in washington well this is oh this is the four-year-old loves this because he put the whole collection of crabs every time he sees them he puts them all in the box and he thinks that's great fun but um it's just these have always been on this table wait hold on this is a perfect chance for me to plug my book because i took the uh interior pages right from this fabric i took a photo and so it's all matching this has been here since 1968 and it's really held up remarkably well it's one of the few things that isn't frayed and shredded we bring shabby chic to a whole new level this picture was by howard cushing who was a very well-known painter who lived right across the way this was my great grandmother's or my grandmother's piano from alabama and she was a composer and a harpist originally there was a man in newport who was one of her best friends called thomas hagerman and he helped her design the whole thing but she pretty much you know he got the stuff you know she she always knew exactly what she wanted i mean all of this paneling which came out of the elms which is one of the preservation society houses it was stuck up in the attic and they hadn't been using it and she bought it all and pretty much designed the rooms around it i don't believe in having you know children and dogs around and not letting them sit in the furniture or touch anything i think a house is meant to be lived in and enjoyed and that hence you know chins is the most wonderful thing and anything with a pattern that can be thrown up on or pooped on and it doesn't matter the first summer i re-hung all of the paintings she had here and i had you know i mean that was a that's a colossal house next door and so it it had you know 10 bedrooms and it was probably 12 000 square feet and i really liked all my paintings and so i brought all mine over and that first summer i hung 300 paintings all over the house i might add without a ruler just you by eye and but it was really satisfying you know i i like walls that are well covered my wife often comments it's like coming to summer camp almost because you know the more things change everywhere else the more they stay the same here and you come back and you pick up right where you left off and you kind of leave your worries at the door unless you have an old house and everything's leaking and cracking my mother didn't do anything since 1968 so it's every time i turn around you know the other day the toilet was leaking into the front hall it's she named the house the whim which quite frankly i've never liked um but for lack of a better name here it is and so i have i've never quite known actually and i forgot to ask her which is one of the many things i forgot to ask her um but this the whole house is it's a combination of things from her house in washington things that stayed here things i brought over from next door and every other place i've ever lived so it's very much sort of an eclectic combination of just things that i like a lot and i had a lot of paintings and she had quite a lot of paintings and i sold a lot of hers and hung a lot of mine i kept these wonderful dolphin tables which i really don't know anything about but i've always loved them the cane stand came from her house in alabama and montgomery where she grew up this painting was painted by the man who built our house in georgetown which was a wonderful big house on the corner of rn wisconsin right across from the georgetown public library so this is the library this is one of a number of rooms that are crammed with books uh i have a that's sort of my weakness and i finally went to kindle because my house was reaching critical mass this portrait was painted of me when i was 25 and pregnant with my middle son by a wonderful watercolor artist named alan blagdon who lives in connecticut and tell them about the cat box in the corner oh yeah the cat the lovely cat box is in the corner because i have a fabulous himalayan cat who's hiding from the pit bull upstairs somewhere and uh it's he decided when we first moved back here that he didn't want to use the nice kitty litter box in the bathroom upstairs but he wanted to go in the corner so now there's a now there's a kitty litter box in the library i run a instagram blog with my family called the social life where i'm constantly taking pictures of my wife and my kids in kind of uh funny slimerin's-esque wes anderson-esque uh situations um so i definitely remember a photo like that in here this is the one room that really hasn't changed since she had it other than pictures different pictures hung but this is really exactly the way she decorated it in 1968. she had um one of the best collections that in america probably of anti-slavery um art artifacts and and pictures and and it's it's really extraordinary and i've been trying to figure out who to uh donate it to it was during the kennedy administration and um she went to a costume party with um full leotard tights one side was black one side was white and everything's going what are you she said i'm integration i've never heard that story you haven't yeah i mean i love this oh the chicken you should definitely get the rooster this was the kind of whimsical touches that we both like to add in in the house in washington albert hadley did the house and but it never looked decorated because there were always thousands of books lying around and little objects and you know nothing nothing was perfect but it was lovely well that's the other thing i photograph a lot of interiors and there's a lot of interiors in my book and to me it's really important that things aren't over styled that they look lived in and they look natural there's nothing i hate more than a room that looks like you know a stylist came in and you know put everything perfectly where it goes like we did this morning before you got here well i think there's curated uncurated right you know uh just not i my goal was just to make it look not like uh we should have taken we should have taken before and after pictures [Music] this is an interesting desk it originally belonged to edward vii and i somehow my grandfather or great-grandfather got a hold of it i have no idea so this used to be my grandmother's um uh kind of study slash sitting room yeah tv room library basically lived in this room um and one of my favorite photos and probably one of my most uh shared photos is of my grandmother sitting in the corner there what i i love this you know just in that picture it's just all the clutter and um and how it kind of doesn't look it's cluttered but doesn't look cluttered she had books stacked up on the floor even next next to her chair and and she collected country life magazines and you know which comes out once a week and she never threw out i told her she was going to end up like the collier brothers who were hoarders that died under a huge pile of newspapers but they were everywhere so this is positively zen compared to what it looked like [Music] this was her dining room and it's my my family room this is where we spend the most time this was a a painting i picked up in over here in nassau about 30 years ago from a really well-known bahamian artist named amos ferguson who painted with house paint on cardboard this i absolutely love which nick did of my mother when he was at georgetown and it in colored pencil and i quite frankly think it's kind of extraordinary because he got her completely these were a present from a friend and i just love it's the wicked witch and those are always there always we're gonna go toward the kitchen now this was sort of our gallery wall of family pictures of family and friends which nick very kindly hung for me this was a photograph of me by cecil beaton uh he was photographing it for vogue which is this picture here when i was i guess i was 17 and he came and and did a lot of other pictures as well apparently i was quite surly and unimpressed according to if not downright rude so this kitchen she redid in 1957 when she first moved in and i don't haven't decided what i want to do yet i'm going to knock out some walls so in the meantime when i moved in she had there was this disgusting original linoleum floor so i went on amazon i bought 350 dollars worth of black and white sticky tiles and glued them down on the floor i painted the cupboards white and bought red for mica for the counters and two black refrigerators and now it's a 50s diner so might as well go with the theme so i'm it's it's an impossible kitchen and i kind of like to cook but i've been used to it i mean it had until you got to it hadn't been updated since the 50s no it hadn't i think she bought a new stove once a lot of the kitchens in newport are like this yeah i did a whole story for a new york times magazine on kitchens in newport and you have these grand fabulous houses with kitchens that haven't been updated since the 50s because they because the owners didn't cook yeah i mean it was basically you know the chef this is a photo i took of my mother in my grandmother's house in dc um years ago probably yeah you were in georgetown yeah i took it probably 10 years ago um a little bit longer than that one of my favorite not that okay maybe like 15 years ago um but it's one of my favorite rooms of all time um was it albert hadley or was it albert alvarez no it was albert hadley and you can see the carpets they are the ones in the living room but it's one of my favorite photos in one of my favorite rooms and i'm thinking of bringing those sofas out of storage those are mine as well okay all right but i'm thinking of bringing them out of nick's storage that he hasn't gone into in 10 years and putting them in the living room [Music] so these are very cool um these are all first edition james bond novels by ian fleming signed to my grandmother um this one isn't but um she was great friends with ian fleming and the uh yeah like that um uh she was great friends with the ian fleming actually named a character felix lighter after my grandfather and my grandmother says that she's the reason that james bond is famous because she was great friends with jfk and great friends with ian fleming and she introduced ian fleming to jack kennedy and when he was still a senator and a couple years later when he was president he was asked by a newspaper or a magazine uh what his favorite novel was and he said james bond and that's kind of what started the um the fever for for james bond novels this is my bedroom with my wife um who is sitting over here with our dog i told her she had to be on camera so i didn't look like a weirdo who lived by myself with my mother um even though some of that's true well let's not eat all the water usually heirlooms we've cleaned it up for you guys but there's usually multiple children in here legos all over the floor um i tend to i mean i love being in this house just because the the room has even though it's got these incredible things incredible you know wallpaper and fabrics it feels still like homey so when we're in here i just feel like cozy and comfortable um it doesn't feel stuffy and really we're like a reality show and that's um kind of part of what i love i mean every night i have a kid in my bed everything and this one's usually in the bed as well and no this is my third child this is my fourth child [Laughter] we love just staying here we love being with family i love that my mother-in-law's right here the kids climb into bed with her in the morning um so yeah this is just it's just home um we love these linens this is um amalia which is like a brand i just found and it is like they're incredibly soft um they have like a lot of them have a modern touch this one's like you know goes really well in this house and it's just you know sharing this with the kids too it's like multi-generational right like they love this doll in the corner with the little notes and the money on it and you know it's just i think it's been here forever since otzi was here and kind of the someone's like thank you note is here someone put a dollar at some point somebody put fake nails on it i mean it's just one of those things that like kind of has grown over time um and it's sort of become a fixture poems that nick have have written that i highly recommend you do not zoom in on because it's really really bad but um it's just fun because then the kids get to see all of this stuff and see all the memories i think people are so quick to get rid of everything old and then sort of the history is gone and i think we love i mean i love history and i and familial history but also you know kind of the world and i think um houses like this just kind of aren't around anymore everybody wants everything perfect no stains and you know this house has lived in so once again the perfect opportunity to plug my book like you put one in every room i'm assuming this is it without its uh jacket on and as you can see it matches uh the uh couch and the bed and as you'll see the bathroom and it yeah when i was looking for jackets i just i thought this was a really cool kind of fun fun print so i love a good bathroom my favorite rooms to photograph are actually bathrooms and kitchens he does loves a good bathtub and i do love a good bathtub but i just think this wallpaper is amazing um and the fact that it's lasted this long i think this has been here since my grandmother i usually when the kids are screaming i lock myself into the shower on with a popsicle and i'm like i'm taking a shower and i just eat a popsicle for 20 minutes alone you know because that's what moms have to do to survive we don't give her a lot of alone time so this is for sure so this was my mom's artist studio painting studio originally it was a bedroom but when you moved in you turned it into your studio and now during the summers i take it over as my office where i edit photos and do do whatnot but this is one of my favorite rooms i love this room i love the curtains i feel like that it's just it's a lot of colors that i wouldn't think go together but end up working really well essentially you bring it all in and cross your fingers that it actually works even if it doesn't furniture has to be comfortable you have to be able to lie down and read a book or sink into a big chair and read a book anything that you can read a book in basically that's the key for me so this is my bedroom and it i might add it's about to be redone so don't pay too much attention to all the differing fabrics and the very old carpet it's was originally nick is very mad at me because it was painted black and it was really a beautiful it was sort of a showcase room with lots of wonderful shell furniture and chinese lacquer and pretty fabulous but i have a thing about light so i the first thing i did was painted it white and he's really not happy with me um and it's just you know it's a little bit of of everything you know more of little boxes i have my feather collection over here on on this table all my feathers i've collected over the years i have a large crystal collection which is all inside that cabinet why do you clutch feathers i don't know i just think they're beautiful it's just a little bit of everything and a little bit less of everything than this morning because don't open the closets nick made me clean it up so um but i love this room again because of the light and and the amazing view i mean it looks right down uh to the ocean and into the garden here's the whole family so this is um archer and archer is four and johnny turn around johnny is seven and uh this is one of our first summers staying here so now they're both so big they can share this room together um and it's sort of you know it's very sweet that they can they get to spend a lot of time together here we and we try not to mess up the rest of the house so this is like the kids space where we have snacks and all the books we have toys up here and i think my favorite thing about other about of the room is that i um i have good space to like the beds because i usually watch a lot of youtube on that and we're gonna be on youtube archer can you look at the camera and say your name hey you hey you okay we'll say let's go on the golf cart go on okay maybe that didn't work so this is my probably my favorite part of the whole house this is the property because um my mother designed this garden and it really was it's a fabulous garden um it's actually in the smithsonian the plants for the garden um so it's it was considered one of the premier gardens in the united states i think this is the the best part in the summer lots of family and kids and this is the it's a gardening shed and this is a rose a climbing rose called miss newport and for years nobody knew what it was because it seemed to be unique to this property this particular strain and so it was eventually named miss newport it's used to grow practically nowhere else but on this property basically no newport house is complete without hydrangeas it's the one thing i always associate with summer time and i was really shocked when i went to new zealand some years ago that they consider hydrangeas weeds there i was stunned [Music] but i be i just love them i like anything blue in the garden a lot of the plants are new this year in this garden so they all look a little unformed because it got a little out of hand last summer and i had to pull a lot of things out but it's really going to be spectacular when they all grow in this is the gate between the two houses which i left there because we can still walk back and forth to see our neighbors and this is beautiful crack grasses in the summer when you see the heron coming out and the grass is blowing and it's really lovely but it's it's still early so nothing's really grown yet that's the temple of doom my mother found it at a garden show years ago and um didn't buy it and then her landscaper gave it to her as a present and it used to have a a top anyway the installation everything turned into the singular most expensive folly on the face of the planet so we named it the temple of doom in the bushes over here we'll walk closer so you get a better shot is ahead of angela davis that my mother absolutely loved and had shipped back from poland in the early 70s and it's got you know peace and love and everything all carved into her head but i love this piece this is probably my favorite thing on the property and it used to i need to move it again it used to sit further out in the lawn well i think for me newport is a very cool place and unlike a lot of other summer communities because it's very family oriented the same families have been in the same houses for generations and you know the same people that my grandmother was friends with my mother was friends with their their kids and i'm friends with their kids and our kids are growing up together um so in a lot of ways no matter where uh i i moved to or live coming back for the summers really is like coming back home yeah i've always thought of it newport as home too even though i grew up in washington and i've lived lots of other places for me it's just total relaxation and i i just stay at home a lot frankly and enjoy my garden and my house and i don't go to a lot of the big parties and i fly under the radar i get a real sense of peace you know and happy times and you know family children picnics you know the typical idyllic summer grateful every day for this view thanks