A Gilded Dream in Stone
Clarendon Court rises on Newport's Bellevue Avenue with a quiet confidence. Its limestone façade, perfectly symmetrical and crowned with urns along the roofline, looks like something lifted directly from 18th-century England.
That is not far from the truth. In 1901, Philadelphia heir Edward Collings Knight Jr. purchased a parcel of land overlooking Narragansett Bay and commissioned architect Horace Trumbauer to build a summer home that would display his place among the elite.
Trumbauer found inspiration in Colen Campbell's unbuilt Hedworth House and reimagined it for the Rhode Island coast.
By 1904, the house was finished, a Palladian villa of approximately 12,000 square feet, adorned with Doric columns and wrought-iron gates.
Inside, Jules Allard & Sons of Paris created period-accurate Georgian interiors, from marble floors to fireplaces imported from Europe.
Every detail reflected a desire not only to belong but to emulate aristocracy itself.
The Knights entertained in rooms designed to impress, with a marble foyer leading to a sweeping staircase that seemed meant for grand entrances.
Clarendon Court was both a home and a declaration that the American Gilded Age could rival Europe's centuries of grandeur.
Changing Hands in a Changing City
The fantasy did not last long for the family that built it. Clara Waterman Dwight died in 1910, leaving Edward a widower.
He remarried and directed his attention to other projects, including a vast Art Nouveau retreat in North Carolina.
Clarendon Court, meanwhile, began its slow drift through new owners.
By the 1930s, it was purchased by Mae Cadwell Hayward and her husband, Colonel William Hayward, who preserved the estate during a time when many of Newport's so-called cottages fell to disrepair or demolition.
Mae later married banker John Rovensky, and together they maintained the house and grounds, even as the city around them shifted away from its role as America's summer capital for the aristocracy.
By mid-century, Newport was a quieter place.
Grand lawns were subdivided, parties that once defined the social season had faded, and the survival of estates like Clarendon Court was no longer assured.
Yet the mansion remained, its gates guarding a vestige of a past that was already receding into memory.
The Von Bülow Intrusion
The house reentered the public eye in 1970, when it was sold to Martha "Sunny" von Bülow, an heiress to a utilities fortune, and her husband Claus, a Danish-born socialite.
They brought life back to the mansion with holidays, dinners, and the presence of family.
But in December 1979, after a Christmas gathering, Sunny was found unconscious in her room.
Doctors diagnosed her with dangerously low blood sugar, a case of hypoglycemia worsened by a mix of insulin, alcohol, and medications.
She recovered, but warnings followed. Then, in December 1980, almost to the day, she collapsed again.
This time, she never woke. At 48, she entered a vegetative state that would last for nearly three decades, until she died in 2008.
What had been a private tragedy became one of the most public scandals in American legal history.
The story of Newport's elegant villa was suddenly inseparable from the suspicions that darkened its halls.
Trials and a Nation Watching
The case against Claus von Bülow turned Clarendon Court from a private retreat into one of the most recognizable homes in America.
In December 1980, Sunny von Bülow collapsed in her bedroom and never woke again.
Less than two years later, her husband was indicted for trying to kill her with insulin. What followed was not just a trial but a national spectacle.
Every day, newspapers printed photos of the mansion's limestone gates beside courtroom sketches.
Witnesses spoke of syringes hidden in a black bag, family feuds, and inheritances worth tens of millions.
Claus sat through it all, polished and unreadable, while the jury listened to experts debate whether Sunny's coma could be explained by illness alone.
His conviction in 1982 landed like a thunderclap. It seemed, briefly, that unimaginable wealth could not keep a man from prison.
Nothing about the case stayed fixed. In 1985, after an appeals court declared the case flawed, Claus was retried and acquitted.
Sunny's children refused to yield, suing him for $56 million.
The civil case settled quietly, with no clear winner. Out in the wider world, the verdicts were mixed.
To some, Claus was exonerated. To others, he had walked away only because wealth and power cleared his path.
A Legacy Both Elegant and Haunted
Clarendon Court still rises from its perch on Bellevue Avenue, limestone walls warmed by the Atlantic light.
To walk past it is to glimpse a vision of the Gilded Age preserved intact: Doric columns, manicured gardens, a cobblestone court leading to a sweeping staircase inside.
Yet those who know its story can never see it as just architecture.
The house has become inseparable from the image of Sunny von Bülow slipping into a coma within its rooms, and the years of courtroom drama that followed.
Every sale since has carried that dual inheritance, from the art dealer who bought it in the 1980s to the developer who paid $30 million in 2021.
The estate is still admired as one of Newport's most beautiful survivors.
But it is also haunted, a reminder that grandeur does not prevent tragedy, and that behind even the most polished façades, lives can come undone.