Inside a Gilded Age Mansion Designed to Hide Its Servants | Inside History

This is the Elms, the summer home built for Hermione and Edward J. Berwyn during the Gilded Age. The Elms was built for the Berwyn family as their summer cottage amongst many of their friends who came from New York for about six weeks a year. Those neighbors and friends included the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and many other names you might recognize from the turn of the century. The Elms was completed in 1901 and came to a total 60,000 square feet. Most of what that 60,000 square feet serves, however, are the domestic workers and not the Berwyns themselves. But you'd never know because of the way the architect designed and engineered this building. The Elms was designed to conceal the labor that made it run and perform at one of the highest levels during the Gilded Age. Nearly every great space of this house has a support space adjacent to it where servants are doing their work in a nearly invisible way so that the house would operate like magic. Edward Berwyn was a first generation American born to German immigrants and then went on to become a multi-millionaire in a global empire of not only coal production but also shipping. What we see in this hall are a variety of different kinds of marble imported as well as gilt bronze and a whole host of artwork that helped communicate to the Berwyns guests what a Gilded Age interior should and could be. It was a time of enormous wealth but also enormous disparity of wealth. So this is the servant staircase and the service entrance where the domestic workers of the house would have their comings and goings. While the main staircase was proportioned for ease of ascending and descending and difficult shoes and large dresses, this staircase did not offer the same luxury. It's incredibly steep because it's hidden inside the main body of the house. If you're looking at the Elms from the exterior you'll notice that the house is totally symmetrical and there isn't a true servant's wing that you might expect and that's because the architect designed it so that you couldn't even see the service happening. So on the north side of the building from the outside it looks like a two-story home but in fact this is eight flights of stairs going from the basement where most of the work took place all the way up to the servants quarters where they lived and had their personal time. Where the staircase starts on this level is where the kitchen is housed. Up on the next level of the first floor your direct access to the butler's pantry where food would be then served to the breakfast room of the dining room. The mezzanine level above that would be another access level to a two-story butler's pantry. And then where the primary bedrooms are located on the second floor you have access to the maid's room where Mrs. Berwyn's beautiful outfits would be altered and changed by her lady's maid. And finally at the top would be where the servants lived and slept in a corridor almost dormitory style where they had their living spaces bathrooms and additional offices. And by design you can't tell that any of these spaces actually exist when you're a guest in the home. We find ourselves here in the dining room of the elms. Part of creating a house like this during the gilded age was that when it was completed everything was furnished all the artwork was on the walls. The Berwyn's like many of their peers hired a man named Jules Allard from Paris who was able to source all these historic works of art and build whole rooms around them. The grouping of paintings that we have here were created by a variety of artists in Venice during the 17th century depicting the life of Scipio Africanus. This entire collection was bought en bloc and placed in here to give not only the sense of beauty but also the idea of centuries-long permanence that the family was trying to communicate through building a house that was historically referential. The elms was not unique in this way many of their neighbors as well as their peers were also building their gilded age mansions in this historically referential style. Think about the breakers a giant Genoese palazzo or marble house which is based on the Petit Trianon of Versailles. Everyone was finding their own unique ways of bringing history into the contemporary. There was not an aristocracy in the U.S. but there was a wealth class that was of the same level as the aristocracy so why not copy their buildings. The idea of copying aristocracy wasn't just limited to the buildings themselves the ways in which the Vanderbilts the Berwyn's and their peers were entertaining was also mimicking what they saw in the elite classes of Europe. In order to serve the dining room there had to be an adjacent space for the servants to also prepare and give that level of service expected of people like the Berwyn's. So we're in the Butler's gantry and this is the area where food service had its last stop before the servants and the domestic workers would present the food to the Berwyn's in either the dining room or the breakfast room. The entire food experience here at the elms actually takes place over three levels we have the two-story Butler's pantry and below us we have the kitchen space which in total is nearly 2,000 square feet of how food would be stored prepared and then also presented by comparison to dining room and breakfast room or far less perhaps 200 square feet. By making the Butler's pantry two levels it allowed for storage to be vertical rather than horizontal allowing for greater spaces on the main floor of the elms for dining and entertaining. So up here on the second level where I am I'm surrounded by glass cases filled with porcelain they would have had a series of silver flatware as well sterling silver that would have traveled with them in specially designed trunks and that would also be stored up on this level in a carefully designed and concealed safe. The silver at the time that was used for utensils was solid sterling silver and therefore its weight was judged by the actual value of silver itself. This three-story dumbwaiter system actually made it possible for the service spaces on the main level of the house to be made smaller so that they weren't as present and appeared almost invisible. The dining room and the Butler's pantry are one of the best examples in this house of where one floor for the Berwyn's is two floors for the servants. We're here on the second floor of the elms in the hallway which is lined with the bedrooms for Mr. and Mrs. Berwyn as well as their guests. Running parallel to this larger hallway is a small narrow passageway that was designed specifically for servants to have access to Edward and Hermione Berwyn. In that hallway also is a concealed door that leads directly into Hermione's bedchamber that both Edward and the servants would have had discrete access to visit with her or conduct business. There are two skylights on this level one of which is behind me and they both allow natural light to pass through and light up these spaces. What you can't see however is that there's another level above where those skylights are. We are standing now on the third floor of the elms which is a long corridor lined with the bedrooms of the family's household servants. So what I'm standing on right now is actually the skylight that you saw downstairs and what the servants have on the third floor is essentially the middle space between where the natural light is actually coming from and lighting up their living spaces as well. So from the perspective of the Berwyns and their guests on the second floor seeing that natural light coming through the ceiling would indicate that there is not another level of this house. So this is an engineering trick and a design trick created by the architect to again make another part of this space invisible. This floor is actually 15,000 square feet but you wouldn't even know that this level exists because there's a large cornice designed all the way around four sides of the house hiding it from the street view and from the public. Having that cornice did also serve the servants in its own way because it allowed for an outdoor space for them to get fresh air get more natural light into their living quarters and privacy in particular. At this time working in domestic servitude was an option and it was one of many options that people had for a career path. So to get the best and highest quality staff members you had to have really lovely accommodations for them their own bathrooms their own bedrooms access to natural light and fresh air. As the Berwyns were known to entertain quite a lot their servants were kept very busy and so when they have the opportunity to get a breath of fresh air it was actually a luxury to be able to just step outside of one's room and go out on the roof to have that outdoor space. They also did have access to the grounds of the elms and on occasion would bring family members to come experience the 13 and a half acres that make up the elms property. We are in the sub-basement of the elms and behind me is a very long tunnel that is secretly hidden underground where Edward Berwyn would have his coal delivered out of sight. It was actually coming through an opening in the sidewalk outside of the property walls dumped into a cart just like this one and then hand pushed by the servants into the boiler room. So coal delivery during the gilded age was an incredibly dirty utility and in order to get the coal into the house most of these gilded age mansions in Newport had very specific coal chutes or tunnels in which the coal would be deposited and delivered. Usually it was attached somewhat to the house where even a coal delivery would be made on the property but Berwyn went through the extra and more extraordinary expense of having the tunnel dug out underground and then having the coal delivered outside of the property walls so that he wouldn't even have to see it. Having ample coal was important to Berwyn because it was part of the industry that he had helped foster and mature in North America and the mining of coal as well as the refining of it was the basis of Berwyn's fortune. This is one of the prime examples as to how the elms was designed to conceal the labor that made it run and perform at one of the highest levels during the gilded age. We can learn a lot from this house and from Berwyn himself. The gilded age stems from the 1883 publication by Mark Twain which was essentially describing the time in which he lived and the term gilded was not a term of endearment. It was actually used to describe the great disparity between the wealthy and the poor that was happening. The elms reflects a rather pivotal moment in our nation's history and essentially brings us into the idea of what modern America means.