Connections

The Vanderbilts were different from you and me, at least after Cornelius, a self-made man who transformed a ferry business he began in 1810 with $100 into a shipping and railroad empire and became the country's richest man.

By the time his grandson Cornelius 2d was a grown man, the family had become as royal as you can get in this country, and the house he commissioned in 1892, the Breakers, became the largest and most sumptuous of the summer cottages in Newport, R.I. Palace is a more appropriate word for the Breakers, which took its inspiration from the Italian Renaissance and kept going from there.

It may or may not be true that the structure Ira Rennert has commissioned in Sagaponack will be the largest single-family house in the country, but it certainly isn't the largest ever built. Comparatively, it isn't even all that large.

The Breakers is a three-story mansion of 138,000 square feet, compared to the Rennerts' main house of 66,000 square feet, and that doesn't include the stables, with room for 26 horses, numerous carriages, and accommodations for a dozen grooms, the greenhouses, the one-story children's house, the caretaker's cottage with its separate furnace wing, or the ice house.

The total square footage of the accessory structures wasn't immediately available; suffice it to say it would dwarf the Rennert compound's 100,000 square feet.

A spokeswoman for the Preservation Society of Newport County also explained that the square footage of the Breakers includes the attic, but that there was no second story (and therefore no floor space) to be counted over the Great Hall or formal dining room.

The Breakers was, as the Rennerts' is said to be, a summer residence. It has only 14 bedrooms exclusive of servants quarters, though, in comparison to 25 at the Rennerts', and only 23 bathrooms in comparison to the Rennerts' 33, but then the Rennert house is not expected to have 27 fireplaces as the Breakers does.

For all its excessiveness, the Breakers is a lot smaller than some other Vanderbilt mansions. It has only 70 rooms, albeit some excessively large ones, compared to Cornelius 2d's Manhattan palace, a 150-room mansion at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, or Biltmore House, which was built by his brother, George Washington Vanderbilt, in 1895. Although it has not been used as a home since 1957, Biltmore still is billed as the largest private residence in the United States.

The Biltmore and the Breakers, like other grand mansions of the Gilded Age, are museums now. But they do help put Ira Rennert's Fair Field into perspective.

Helen S. Rattray