House Lust: Inside Bois Doré, the Most Decadent Mansion on the Market
It has twenty-three bedrooms, fourteen bathrooms and one unapologetic poodle.
January 26, 2021
You needn’t scroll through dozens of photographs of Bois Doré to get the picture. You just need this one, of a French poodle, scruffy at the crown and perched atop an antique settee with an air of devil-may-care.
Bois Doré in Newport, like its resident purebred, is unapologetically decadent, from the Battersby trompe l’oeils painted directly onto the dining room walls to the 2,000-square-foot ballroom with an eight-foot antique Regency chandelier.
Designed by famed architect Charles A. Platt, Bois Doré “gilded wood” in French, after the leafy lindens that line the drive was completed in 1927 for William Fahnestock, an investment banker. Its stewards have included Campbell’s Soup heiress Eleanor Winifred Dorrance Hill Ingersoll and, later, oil heiress Carolyn Mary Skelly, both grande dames of Newpor