From the late 1870s to the 1920s, the Vanderbilt family employed some of the best Beaux-Arts architects and decorators in the United States to build a notable string of townhouses in New York City and palaces on the East Coast of the United States. Many of the Vanderbilt houses are now National Historic Landmarks. Some photographs of Vanderbilt residences in New York are included in the Photographic series of American Architecture by Albert Levy (1870s).
The list of architects employed by the Vanderbilts is a "who's who" of the New York–based firms that embodied the syncretic (also called "eclectic") styles of the American Renaissance: Richard Morris Hunt; George B. Post; McKim, Mead, and White; Charles B. Atwood; Carrère and Hastings; Warren and Wetmore; Horace Trumbauer; John Russell Pope and Addison Mizner were all employed by the descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who built only very modestly himself.