Villa Rosa (Newport, Rhode Island)

 house, place with historical importance, cottage, condos, mansion / manor house / villa, demolished

architect - Ogden Codman
demolished - 1962

Built as the summer residence of Mr. and Mrs. E. Rollins Morse of Boston and New York, Villa Rosa was amongst Codman’s most successful country houses. Oriented to the south, rather than to the street, the house took maximum advantage of its long narrow setting. The gateposts led to a forecourt and then a walled inner court whose visual perspective from the street was terminated with a classical fountain set into a niche. The niche with its trellis-decorated rear wing was actually staff quarters and the villa’s Neoclassical façade opened to the left onto the gravel courtyard. This plan was based on that of eighteenth-century French aristocratic townhouses and was unique in America of 1900. The exterior of the house was covered in pastel yellow stucco offset with white bas-relief panels and was crowned by a copper dome. The lawn terminated at Narragansett Avenue with a circular marble gazebo copied from Marie Antoinette’s Temple of Love (1778) by Mique at Versailles.

Villa Rosa’s interiors were equally impressive. A rigorous French Classicism dominated with white or white and green paneled reception rooms. The heart of the house was the green trellised circular Music Room or Ballroom, the first room in the United States to incorporate lattice design as a decorative scheme.

Subsequently occupied in 1913 by the James Ben Ali Haggin family of California, Kentucky, and New York, Villa Rosa was sold by the estate of its final occupant, Mrs. Emily Coddington Williams, on July 20, 1953 for $21,500 to E.A. McNulty, a Rhode Island contractor. Ogden Codman’s masterpiece was demolished in December of 1962 and an apartment complex built on the site in 1965. Townhouse condominiums replaced the gardens in the 1970s and the gateposts, a final vestige, were cleared in 2004.