The tour featured actors portraying the daily lives of those who inhabited, ran, and cared for the estate. In 1981, Paul Madden re-opened the renovated house with 20 costumed actors who were trained to remain in character as they played all the roles of a Victorian household, including butlers, footmen, maids, and doormen. Together with the University of Rhode Island History and Drama Departments, he started the 'Beechwood Theatre Company', which conducted live theatrical tours to over a million mansion visitors. He undertook extensive renovations, including a new main entrance onto Bellevue Avenue. Madden from Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, who was a recent graduate of the National Film and Television School in the United Kingdom. In 1981, Beechwood was purchased by Paul M. Carey, John Page-Blair and Richard Merrill. Over the course of the subsequent four decades, the house was owned in succession by James Cameron Clark, Gurnee Dyer, William W.

In 1940, Allene Tew and her fifth husband, Count Pavel de Kotzebue, purchased Beechwood from Vincent Astor. Vincent later rented out the home to Robert R. After Jack's death on the Titanic in 1912, it passed to his son Vincent (by his first wife, Ava). Astor died in 1908, Beechwood was left to her son, John Jacob Astor IV, who married his second wife Madeleine in its ballroom in 1911. Beechwood became the showplace for many of Mrs. The house also boasts a library, a dining room and a music room with wallpaper imported from Paris. Astor hired architect Richard Morris Hunt to do many renovations, including the addition of a ballroom to fit the famous ' Four Hundred'. He had married Caroline Webster Schermerhorn, who would be known as ' the Mrs. In 1880, Beechwood was purchased by William Backhouse Astor Jr. After a fire in 1855, it was rebuilt in 1856 based on the original plans, Vaux superintending the construction. Vaux completed the house in 1853 with a 'Palladian spirit' and published it in his book Villas and Cottages (1857). Downing's trip to visit the building site with Parish in July 1852 never occurred he died in a steamboat accident before reaching New York. Being a nephew of Thomas Powell, a steamboat magnate from Newburgh, New York, Parish commissioned the design from Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux, whose office was based there. 1.2 Larry Ellison ownership (2010–present)īeechwood was built as a marine villa for New Yorker Daniel Parish, a clothing merchant whose operations extended to Southern cities.

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