Mary Bruen House (The Hedges)

Richard Morris Hunt, hired by Bostonian summer resident Mary Bruen, capped an original, predominantly rubblestone structure with a complementary picturesque cap of gables, balconies, and stickwork bracing. Although only a renovation of an existing residence, this three-and-one- half-story house, like Hunt's other Newport work from this period (i.e., no longer extant houses for Thomas Appleton, Henry Marquand, and others), is a continued exploration of the motifs he had begun to explore almost a decade earlier, a hybrid of European and American vernacular sources still visible today in the J. N. A. Griswold House (see Newport Art Museum, NE89).

The house has no relationship to Bellevue Avenue today, but it, like the nearby Château-sur-Mer, was originally conceived as one of the large summer homes set far back from that newly opened avenue. In the early twentieth century the lot was split, and the section closer to Bellevue was developed separately and subsequently acquired its name, The Hedges, some time after the Bruen family sold the property.