Seafield (Newport, Rhode Island) | place with historical importance, cottage, estate (manor / mansion land), mansion / manor house / villa, interesting place

 house, place with historical importance, cottage, estate (manor / mansion land), mansion / manor house / villa, interesting place

Harper-Field-Warren Estate
Architect: Thomas Alexander Tefft
Demolished: 1966

Miss Emily Harper, granddaughter of Charles Carroll of Baltimore, commissioned a mansard-roof cottage with continuously shingled walls and roof from the then-popular Providence architect Thomas Tefft. The same year, Miss Harper and her mother provided most of the money to erect St. Mary’s Church in Newport by the architect Patrick C. Keely. The house was subsequently sold to John M. Fields of Philadelphia and re-baptized “Seafields.” The George Henry Warrens of New York subsequently owned the property through World War II. Following the War, the house was leased seasonally and its last occupants were the owners, crew, families, and staff of the British challenging yacht for the America’s Cup, The Sovereign, in 1964. Known popularly as “Mildew Manor” by these tenants, Seafield was demolished in 1966. A new house was built on the land in 2000.
www.newportmansions.org/learn/history-highlights/lost-n...

Birger Wernerfelt and Cynthia Montgomery House (2001; Robert A.M. Stern and The Newport Collaborative, architects):
The centerpiece of this 121⁄2-acre oceanfront parcel is an exceptionally large and large-scale 11⁄2-story, U-plan Neo-Shingle Style house with double-slope-hip-roof main block flanked on the south by a flared-gambrel-roof service wing and on the north by a stretched-octagonal- plan pavilion with central cupola, fully exposed basement story on the main block’s west elevation, asymmetrical massing and fenestration, end-gambrel-roof entrance pavilion with large off-center end-gambrel-roof entrance porch, full-width porches with turreted pavilions at north and south ends on the west elevation of the main block, large off-center brick chimney on the main block, and large off-center octagonal cupola with long, narrow balustraded deck on the ridgeline of the main block. The design of this house was adapted from a Stern house on the Maine Coast for construction on this site; topographical differences between the two sites necessitated changes in elevations, especially the building’s interaction with the site. To the northeast of the house is a single tennis court.

This was built for two business-school professors, Wernerfelt at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Montgomery at Harvard Business School. While this house does not contribute to the significance of the district because it falls outside the period of significance, it nevertheless is consistent in type, form, scale, and setting with those properties that create the district’s significance. (1 non-contributing building; 1 non- contributing structure)