Biltmore Estate — manor house
Blake Lewis · CC BY-SA 2.0

Biltmore Estate

  • 2 min read
  • 35.540° N 82.552° W

Interesting facts

  • In 1942 the National Gallery of Art moved 62 paintings and 17 sculptures, including works by Rembrandt and Raphael, into Biltmore's unfinished Music Room for safekeeping.
  • The name joins De Bilt, the Dutch town the Vanderbilt family came from, with more, a word for open, rolling land.
  • The library ceiling painting, The Chariot of Aurora by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, was brought from the Palazzo Pisani Moretta in Venice.
  • The Grand Staircase climbs 107 steps around a four-storey wrought-iron chandelier holding 72 light bulbs.
  • The basement holds a 70,000-gallon heated indoor swimming pool with underwater lighting, a bowling alley and a gymnasium.
  • The house had electricity from the start, at first running on direct current because Vanderbilt was a friend of Thomas Edison.
  • Every roof slate was drilled at the corners and wired individually to a steel frame; the copper ridge trim bears Vanderbilt's initials.
  • To build the house, a woodworking factory and brick kiln were set up on site, along with a 3-mile railway spur to haul materials.
  • Secret panels beside the Billiard Room fireplace open into the Bachelors' Wing, and the library hides a passage leading to the guest rooms.
  • Hunt's mantel for the Music Room lay in the stables for more than 80 years; the room was only finished and opened to the public in 1976.

Why it is worth it

Biltmore is a French Renaissance château transplanted to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and it is still the largest privately owned house in the United States. George Washington Vanderbilt II, heir to one of the great fortunes of the Gilded Age, came to the Asheville area repeatedly in the 1880s, bought up some 125,000 acres in nearly seven hundred parcels, and between 1889 and 1895 built a country house on a scale no American family had attempted before: about 250 rooms, among them 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms and 65 fireplaces, under a façade 375 feet long of Indiana limestone.

The architect was Richard Morris Hunt, and he drew openly on the Loire, taking cues from the châteaux of Blois, Chambord and Chenonceau, with a nod to Waddesdon Manor in England. The result is the grandest American example of the Châteauesque style, a skyline of steep roofs, towers and carved stone. Inside, the Spanish builder Rafael Guastavino supervised his self-supporting vaults of interlocking ceramic tile, and the rooms are of a matching ambition: a banquet hall with a barrel-vaulted ceiling some 70 feet high, and a library of more than 10,000 volumes in eight languages. John Singer Sargent's portraits of Hunt and of Frederick Law Olmsted hang in the house, a tribute to the two men who made it.

Olmsted's part is easy to miss because it was meant to look natural. He designed a deliberately rustic approach road that winds for miles through planted woodland from Biltmore Village to the Esplanade in front of the house, and he laid out the formal gardens, the conservatory, the Bass Pond and the Lagoon below. The estate also has a quieter claim to history: its woods were managed first by Gifford Pinchot and then by Carl Schenck, who founded the Biltmore Forest School here in 1898, the first school of forestry in the United States. Some 87,000 acres of the estate were later sold to the federal government and became the nucleus of Pisgah National Forest. Vanderbilt's descendants still own the house and about 8,000 acres through a family company; the house was opened to the public in 1930 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963.

Getting there

The estate's entrance is at Biltmore Village on the southern side of Asheville, North Carolina, about 7 km from the city centre. Asheville Regional Airport (AVL) is about 12 km away. Visitors enter along Olmsted's approach road.

On these lists

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From the encyclopaedia

Biltmore Estate is a historic house museum and tourist attraction in Asheville, North Carolina, United States. The main residence is the Biltmore House, a Châteauesque-style mansion built for George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1895. It is the largest privately owned house in the United States at 178,926 sq ft (16,622.8 m2) of floor space and 135,280 sq ft (12,568 m2) of living area. It is still owned by George Vanderbilt's descendants and remains one of the most prominent examples of Gilded Age mansions.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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