Chateau-sur-Mer is the first of the grand Bellevue Avenue mansion of the Gilded Age mansions in Newport, Rhode Island. Chateau-sur-Mer's grand scale and lavish parties ushered in the Gilded Age of Newport, as it was the most palatial residence in Newport until the Vanderbilt houses in the 1890s. It was was completed in 1852 as an Italianate villa for William Shepard Wetmore, a merchant in the China trade, who was born on January 26, 1801, in St. Albans , Vermont. (And, it is the only grand mansion that isn't on the waterfront. -DT)