Vernon Court

Vernon Court
Front elevation from Bellevue Avenue in 2008
General information
Architectural style	French classical
Town or city	Newport, Rhode Island
Country	United States
Construction started	1900
Completed	1901
Client	Anna Van Nest Gambrill
Design and construction
Architect	Carrère and Hastings

41°28′11″N 71°18′25″W / 41.4696°N 71.3069°W / 41.4696; -71.3069

Vernon Court is an American Renaissance mansion designed by architects Carrère and Hastings. It is located at 492 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, on the Atlantic coast of the United States. The design is loosely based on that of an 18th-century French mansion, Château d'Haroué.

Vernon Court was constructed in 1900 to be used as a summer cottage for the widow of Richard Augustine Gambrill, a New York lawyer, Anna Van Nest Gambrill (1865–1927). In addition to her husband's fortune, Anna Gambrill had inherited a substantial sum from her father, Alexander T. Van Nest, a railroad baron. Gambrill's sister, Jane and brother-in-law, Giraud Foster, had commissioned Carrère and Hastings a year earlier to design her estate near Lenox, Massachusetts, Bellefontaine (one of the Berkshire Cottages).

Although Carrère and Hastings typically considered the grounds and the architecture together as an ensemble, Gambrill hired her florists, the firm of Wadley & Smythe, as landscape architects for the property. They based their design for the primary garden loosely on the Pond Garden at Hampton Court Palace In 1904, it was considered one of "the ten most beautiful mansions in America."

The property remained in the Gambrill family until 1956, when it was auctioned. From 1963 until its closing in 1972, it served as the administration building for Vernon Court Junior College, an all-girls school. Over the next two and a half decades it passed through several different owners.