or search for your luxury home anywhere in the world...

Belcourt Castle embodies the hopes and aspirations of a confident America solidifying its place alongside the great houses and courts of European royalty and aristocracy. The creator of Belcourt was Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont who was a renaissance man and heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the world. Belcourt reflects his heritage, his refined and discerning taste, his love of sport, and his passion and respect for the taste of his wife, the remarkable Alva Vanderbilt.

OHP (as Oliver liked to be called) commissioned the world-renowned architect Richard Morris Hunt to design a French Renaissance castle with a Norman-timbered courtyard to include stables and housing for his thirty horses and many coaches. The design was revised many times before the sixty-room Louis XIII Chateau emerged. Construction began in 1891 and was completed in 1894 at a cost of 3,000,000 (more than 60,000,000 today). In 1890 Oliver married Alva Vanderbilt and together they made further revisions to suit their family, much of it under the direction of architect John Russell Pope.

For many years, the principal entrance to Belcourt was through huge carved oak double doors on Ledge Road. One then enters the Grand Hall, with its elegant bay of green hand-hammered cathedral glass windows with the Belmont Coat-of-Arms, which leads to the main staircase. To the left of the staircase is the English library with its Elizabethan linen fold woodwork, a carved plaster work ceiling patterned after Haddon Hall in England, and soaring Gothic fireplace.

One then proceeds up the carved Grand Staircase with walls covered in the original damask with the Belmont ciphers to a Great Hall with vistas, a signature element of Hunt’s work, into some of the most beautiful rooms in America.

It is with the greatest hope and joy that we offer Belcourt to the next owner of this American Historical Treasure.