New York designer and architectural scholar Thomas Jayne spent Friday visiting homes in Newport before attending the Preservation Society of Newport County fund-raising gala on Friday night, the Tiffany Ball.

The visit was part of his research designing his first furniture line, inspired by Newport, R.I., living, which launched in the spring under the auspices of the society. One of his most successful pieces to date is a canopy bed with a green quilted headboard and footboard. The initiative is one of the ways the society is developing earned income streams to fund its work maintaining — and keeping open to the public — 14 Gilded Age properties.

So what has he learned in his time there so far?

In their homes, the doyennes of Newport society are skillful at mixing modern and traditional furniture, he said; and in their manners, well, they don’t mince words.

“Oatsie Charles asked me, “Do you have taste?” Mr. Jayne said as he stepped into the grand location of the ball, the Breakers, designed by Ogden Codman and commissioned by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1893.

Looking very much like a man of taste, dressed in a white jacket and brushing past a red velvet curtain, Mr. Jayne recounted his reply to Mrs. Charles, one of Newport’s best-known doyennes: “I told her, I don’t have as much taste as Albert Hadley, but I have taste,” he said. And that settled the matter.

For the 600 guests at the ball, it would have been hard to not pick up some taste. After all, the setting was the Breakers, surrounded by formal gardens and a lawn leading to the ocean. And then there are the stately and thoughtful interiors, models of symmetry and color, even if few people could or would decorate this way today.

On the night of Friday’s ball, the color blue, on the walls and in the stone of the great fireplace, seemed especially brilliant, perhaps because the ball had a Tiffany blue cast to it.

The iconic blue box tied with white ribbon was the most prominent element of the décor, with more than 200 on display on a table and on the staircase of the main hall.

They were also a fund-raising gambit: Guests purchased the boxes for $150 to earn the chance to win a Tiffany watch or earrings, but those who didn’t win still got to keep their box. Tiffany & Co. also distributed Tiffany playing cards to guests.

The ball, which drew 600 guests, was a re-creation of a ball in 1957, also named the Tiffany Ball. That event — at which the grand prize in the raffle was a round-trip ticket for two from New York to Rome on Scandinavian Airlines — featured something much rarer than the Tiffany box.

“It was one of the few times that the Tiffany diamond was worn,” the head of the Tiffany & Co. Foundation, Fernanda Kellogg, said. “Walter Hoving lived up here and he made it happen.”

The 2008 event featured music by the Alex Donner Orchestra and a meal of lobster salad, beef, and cheesecake.

The chairman of the society, Pierre Irving, was 8 years old when the original ball took place, so his parents left him at home that night, he said.

However, Nuala Pell, the wife of Senator Claiborne Pell, was at the original ball. Mrs. Pell was 33 at the time, with four young children at home. She attended with friends.

“It was great fun. We were all dressed alike in wonderful shocking pink, and we all wore white wigs,” Mrs. Pell said.

Sitting at a table with her children and grandchildren in 2008, and wearing zebra stripes and hot pink, it didn’t seem like things had changed all that much.

“There are no parties like the ones in Newport, not even the ones at the White House measure up,” Mrs. Pell said.

agordon@nysun.com