Four days in Newport,
two hundred and fifty-three clips,
and what came out of them.

The Vanderbilt, Newport

A 1909 mansion built by Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, now an Auberge hotel on Mary Street. One evening, thirty-five clips: the green door, the conservatory with its striped awning and checkerboard floor, the dark portrait room, the terrace, tea service, food.

This is the piece to watch first if you run a property. It covers a building the way a marketing director needs it covered — arrival, public rooms, guest experience, food — rather than collecting pretty frames and hoping they add up.

Newport Marriott

Seventy-two seconds on a hotel that sells its location rather than its rooms. Arrival, the lobby, the room, the atrium — and then the argument. Bowen's Wharf is six minutes on foot from the lobby door. At twenty to six one morning the whole of it was empty, and I was back in the lift by ten to seven having shot the wharf, the shoreline and the Point.

Shot unhosted across two nights in August. The spa, the breakfast service and the event spaces are not in it, because I paid for a room and filmed what a guest sees. That is the piece a property is buying: an outside eye that arrives, looks, and reports.

Marble House

Ninety seconds, fifty-three cuts, thirty-one clips. Alva Vanderbilt confined her daughter Consuelo to a room until she agreed to marry the Duke of Marlborough, threatened the man Consuelo actually wanted, and then feigned a fatal heart condition when the threat failed. The wedding was 6 November 1895. The duke received two and a half million dollars in railroad stock.

Thirty-one years later Alva testified at the annulment hearing and told the investigator, in her own words:

I forced my daughter to marry the Duke.

The same woman divorced her husband for infidelity in an era when women in her position did not, and spent the last decades of her life funding the campaign for the vote. A dollar bought you the suffrage lectures on the lawn in August 1909. Five got you inside the house.