A4 Spotlight: Champ Soleil

Champ Soleil, Newport, RI (Polhemus & Coffin, 1929)

Champ Soleil: A Newport’s Gilded Age Estate Returns to the Spotlight

On Newport’s famed Bellevue Avenue, a street already lined with American palaces (including the Vanderbilts’ Marble House, the Belmonts’ Belcourt, the Wideners’ Miramar) stands a château that has long kept a lower profile than its neighbors. Champ Soleil, (which in French means “Sunny Field”) is one of the few great, intact, and privately owned Gilded Age estates in Newport. After nearly a century of quiet grandeur, it has stepped back into the national spotlight — and onto the real estate market — with an asking price of $18 million.

A Dynasty’s Summer Palace

The mansion was built in 1929 for Lucy Drexel Dahlgren, granddaughter of Joseph W. Drexel of the Philadelphia banking dynasty Drexel & Company. The Drexels were titans of American finance long before the term “robber baron” entered common usage. Patriarch Anthony J. Drexel had partnered with a young protégé named John Pierpont Morgan, and their firm, Drexel Morgan & Associates, would eventually evolve into what the world knows today as JPMorgan Chase. Their client roster reads like a who’s who of Gilded Age power: the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Astors, Ogdens, and Belmonts — many of whom went on to build the mansions that line Newport’s most celebrated streets.

For their own summer retreat, the Drexels chose elegance over ostentation. They commissioned the renowned New York architectural firm Polhemus & Coffin to design a chateau modeled after La Lanterne, the hunting lodge at Versailles. The result was a 15,000-square-foot French manor sitting behind 18th-century wrought-iron gates — gilded suns worked into the ironwork, quietly announcing the estate’s name to passersby.

A Century of Notable Owners

In the decades after the Drexels, Champ Soleil passed through a succession of prominent hands. The Ogden family, of New York’s Manhattan Bank, expanded the estate by adding a ballroom and servants’ quarters. The property then came to Russell B. Aitken, an artist, big-game hunter, and associate editor of Field & Stream magazine, and his wife Annie Laurie Aitken. Annie Laurie’s daughter from a prior relationship was Martha “Sunny” von Bülow, whose own Newport mansion, Clarendon Court, would later become the setting of one of the most sensational criminal trials of the 1980s — giving Champ Soleil an indirect brush with tabloid notoriety.

The estate’s most transformative chapter in recent memory began in 2003, when real estate developer Kenneth Zarrilli and his husband Joshua McKinney-Zarrilli purchased the property for approximately $4.7 million. Over the following years, the owners invested close to $10 million into a meticulous renovation — the result described by Rhode Island Monthly as “Gilded Age Nouveau”: vast yet comfortable, historically faithful yet fitted for 21st-century entertaining.

Back in the Marketing Spotlight

In October 2025, Champ Soleil returned to national attention when it was listed by Gustave White Sotheby’s International Realty at $22 million — nearly five times what the Zarrillis paid two decades earlier. The listing generated wide coverage, from The Boston Globe to the Providence Journal and beyond, with brokers Paul Leys and David Huberman calling it “spectacular” and noting its extreme rarity.

The property justify the superlatives. Champ Soleil is one of only a limited number Gilded Age estates remaining in all of Newport. The 5.3-acre property includes the main residence’s seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a paneled library, and a home theater, as well as manicured gardens by landscape architect Umberto Innocenti, a croquet lawn, a 20-by-40-foot pool, a greenhouse, a carriage house with four-car garage, and — in what brokers called a remarkably rare amenity even by Newport’s elevated standards — an FAA-approved heliport.

Newport’s assessed value for the property stood at nearly $9 million for fiscal year 2025, making the current $18 million asking price a bold but defensible valuation in a market that has seen multiple eight-figure Bellevue Avenue transactions in recent years. As of this writing, the property remains listed, its gilded gates still catching the sun on one of America’s most storied streets, awaiting the next family worthy of the name.

A4 Architecture has been pleased to assist many of the owners of Bellevue Avenue residences and estates in guiding their home’s renovations. If you have a New England building project in mid where quality and fine design are critical, please reach out to the award-winning professionals at A4 Architecture to assist you in realizing your architectural dream. We look forward to hearing from you.

 

Ross Cann, RA, AIA, LEED AP, is an author, historian, and is the founding Principal of A4 Architecture located in Newport, RI. He holds honor degrees in Architecture and Architectural History from Yale, Cambridge, and Columbia Universities and has taught architectural history in a variety of settings for nearly thirty years.