Shamrock Cliff - OceanCliff (Newport, Rhode Island)

 hotel, place with historical importance, mansion / manor house / villa, shingle style (architecture)

'Shamrock Cliff' was built in 1894-1896 for Baltimore steel industrialist G. M. (Gaun McRobert) Hutton (1848-1916) and his wife, Celeste Marguerite (nee Winans) (1855-1925). It was constructed on the site of the villa built in 1864 for Arthur Bronson (1832-1884) of New York and his wife, Katharine Coleman (nee de Kay) (1834-1901) and overlooks Narragansett Bay. The building contractor for the Romanesque-style'Shamrock Cliff' was McNeil Brothers of Boston; Peabody & Stearns were the architects and Olmstead Brothers the landscape designers. The estate passed from Mr. and Mrs. Hutton to their daughter, Elsie Celeste Hutton (1884-1966), who sold 'Shamrock Cliff' in 1958. The estate eventually was converted to a hotel and resort known as 'OceanCliff.'

Robert Yarnall Richie aerial photo ca. 1932-1934 digitalcollections.smu.edu/u?/ryr,399

One of the largest Newport summer cottages, Shamrock Cliff is a sprawling splayed-U-plan, rough-cut-granite, 2½-story house with complex polychrome-pantile cross-gable roof dominated by two large square-plan, hip-roof, copperfinial towers, 4 stories high at the east end of the south wing and a 3 stories high at the intersection of the main block and the north wing, and large, prominent, regularly spaced chimneys punctuate the building’s low-slung profile. The principal entrance, within a full-width 1-story porch flanked by projecting end-gable pavilions on the east elevation of the main block, faces a circular-plan motor-court terrace, entered through a round-arch portal that penetrates the center of the south wing. Across the rear of the building, overlooking Castle Hill Cove and Narragansett Bay is an enormous 4-section, 1-story addition, equal in area to the footprint of the original house, created and expanded to accommodate the hotel/restaurant/time-share function to which the historic house has been converted.

In addition to the main house is the handsome cadet edition that serves as the gatehouse, at the edge of the property on Ridge Road: a 1½-story rough-cut-granite and brownstone building with prominent circular tower at the northeast corner and a riotously colored complex high-hip roof. Two large modern buildings provide additional quarters for guests: to the north of the main house a low-slung 1½-story, wide-end-gable-roof shingled building and to the south of the main house an ample shingled 3-story, rectilinear-Z-plan building with varying-size square-plan towers at either end of its eastern wing and a round portal through its mass (all imitative of elements on the original house) as well as extensive decking and dormers on the water side. Extant portions of the Olmsted landscape are probably limited to the overall site plan and the strategically placed specimen trees.

Hutton (1849-1915), an Irish diplomat, lived in Baltimore, and his wife, Celeste, was the daughter of Thomas DeKay Winans, whose cottage stood nearby at Ocean Road and Winans Avenue (see 1 Atlantic Avenue). This is the larger and more bombastic of Newport’s 2 waterside Romanesque houses of the 1890s; the other, by Richard Morris Hunt, is at 325 Ocean Avenue.

www.newportexperience.com/oceancliff/weddings
[ additional notes, see 'residence' paragraph jsfecmd.info/gibsonweb-p/p2156.htm ]