Biltmore Estate
Biltmore Estate is a historic house museum and tourist attraction in Asheville, North Carolina. 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 of floor space and of living area. It is still owned by George Vanderbilt's descendants and remains one of the most prominent examples of Gilded Age mansions.
History
began to make regular visits with his mother Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt to the Asheville area in the 1880s, at the height of the Gilded Age. He loved the scenery and climate so much that he decided to build a summer house in the area which he called his "little mountain escape". His older brothers and sisters had built luxurious summer houses in places such as Newport, Rhode Island, the Gold Coast of Long Island, and Hyde Park, New York.Development
Vanderbilt named his estate Biltmore, combining De Bilt with more, an open, rolling land. He eventually bought composing nearly 700 parcels, including over 50 farms and at least five cemeteries. A portion of the estate was once the community of Shiloh. A spokesman for the estate said that much of the land had been "in very poor condition, and many of the farmers and other landowners were glad to sell."Construction of the house began in 1889. A woodworking factory and brick kiln were built on site, and a railroad spur was constructed to bring materials to the building site. Construction on the main house required the labor of about 1,000 workers and 60 stonemasons. Vanderbilt made extensive trips overseas during construction to purchase thousands of furnishings, including tapestries, carpets, prints, linens, and decorative objects dating from the 15th century to the late 19th century. Among the few American-made items were the more practical oak drop-front desk, rocking chairs, walnut grand piano, and bronze candlesticks.
1890s to 1950s
Vanderbilt opened his opulent estate on Christmas Eve of 1895 to family and friends from across the country who were encouraged to enjoy leisure and country pursuits. The Gilded Age mansion reportedly cost $5 million to construct. Guests to the estate over the years included novelists Edith Wharton and Henry James, ambassadors Joseph Hodges Choate and Larz Anderson, and U.S. presidents. Vanderbilt married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser in 1898 in Paris, France. Their only child Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt was born at Biltmore in the Louis XV room in 1900 and grew up at the estate.Vanderbilt initiated the sale of to the federal government, stressed by Congressional passage of income tax and the expensive maintenance of the estate. He died unexpectedly in 1914 of complications from an emergency appendectomy, and his widow completed the sale. She carried out her husband's wish that the land remain pristine and that property become the nucleus of the Pisgah National Forest. She then began consolidating her interests, selling Biltmore Estate Industries in 1917 and Biltmore Village in 1921. She intermittently occupied the house, living in an apartment created in the former Bachelors' Wing, until the marriage of her daughter Cornelia to John Francis Amherst Cecil in April 1924. The Cecils had two sons who were born at Biltmore in the same room where their mother was born.
Cornelia and her husband opened Biltmore to the public at the request of the City of Asheville in March 1930, in an attempt to bolster the estate's finances during the Great Depression. The city hoped to revitalize the area with tourism.
Biltmore closed from 1941 to 1945 during World War II. In 1942, 62 paintings and 17 sculptures were moved to the estate by train from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to protect them in the event of an attack on the United States. The Music Room on the first floor was never finished, so it was used for storage until 1944, when the possibility of an attack became more remote. Among the works stored were the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington and works by Rembrandt, Raphael, and Anthony van Dyck. Gallery director David Finley was a friend of Edith Vanderbilt and had stayed at the estate.
The Cecils divorced in 1934. Cornelia left the estate never to return, but John Cecil maintained his residence in the Bachelors' Wing until his death in 1954. Their eldest son George Henry Vanderbilt Cecil occupied rooms in the wing until 1956. At that point, Biltmore House ceased to be a family residence and was operated as a historic house museum. Their younger son William A. V. Cecil Sr. returned to the estate in the late 1950s and partnered with his brother to manage its financial trouble. They worked to create the profitable and self-sustaining enterprise that their grandfather had envisioned.
1960s to present
William Cecil inherited the estate upon the death of his mother Cornelia in 1976. His brother George inherited the more profitable dairy farm, which was spun off as Biltmore Farms.William Cecil turned over control of the company to his son William A. V. Cecil Jr. in 1995, while celebrating the estate's centenary. The Biltmore Company is privately held. Of the that make up Biltmore Estate, only are within the city limits of Asheville, and the Biltmore House is not part of any municipality.
The estate was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1963, and remains a major tourist attraction in western North Carolina, with around 1.4 million visitors each year.
William A. V. Cecil died in October 2017, and his wife Mimi died the following November. Their daughter Dini Pickering serves as board chairman, and their son Bill Cecil as serves as chief executive officer. The house is assessed at $157.2 million, although county property taxes are paid on only $79.1 million due to an agricultural deferment.
The estate was temporarily closed after Hurricane Helene in September 2024. The group sales office was destroyed, but the Biltmore House, conservatory, and several structures survived without serious damage. The estate's operators subsequently pledged $2 million for hurricane recovery efforts in Western North Carolina. Biltmore Estate reopened in November 2024.
Architecture
Vanderbilt commissioned prominent New York architect Richard Morris Hunt, who had previously designed houses for various Vanderbilt family members, to design the house in the Châteauesque style. Hunt used French Renaissance châteaux as inspiration. Vanderbilt and Hunt had visited several in early 1889, including Château de Blois, Chenonceau and Chambord in France and Waddesdon Manor in England. These estates shared steeply pitched roofs, turrets, and sculptural ornamentation.Form and facade
Hunt sited the four-story Indiana limestone-built home to face east, with a facade to fit into the mountainous topography behind. The facade is asymmetrically balanced with two projecting wings connecting to the entrance tower: an open loggia is to the left side and a windowed arcade to the right, which holds the Winter Garden that was fashionable during the Victorian era. The entrance tower contains a series of windows with decorated jambs that extend from the front door to the most decorated dormer at Biltmore on the fourth floor. The carved decorations include trefoils, flowing tracery, rosettes, gargoyles and, at prominent lookouts, grotesques. The staircase is one of the more prominent features of the east facade, with its three-story, highly decorated winding balustrade with carved statues of St. Louis and Joan of Arc by the Austrian-born architectural sculptor Karl Bitter.The south facade is the house's smallest and is dominated by three large dormers on the east side and a polygonal turret on the west. An arbor is attached to the house and is accessed from the library, which is located on the ground floor. On the north end of the house, Hunt placed the attached stables, carriage house and its courtyard to protect the house and gardens from the wind. The complex housed Vanderbilt's prized driving horses. The carriage house opposite the stables stored his twenty carriages in addition to any of his guests' carriages.
The rear western elevation is less elaborate than the front facade, with some windows not having any decoration at all. Two matching polygonal towers in the center are connected to the polygonal south turret by an open loggia that opens the main rooms of the house to the views of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. The loggia is decorated overhead with terracotta tiles set in a herringbone pattern. The self-supporting ceramic tile vault and arch system was used extensively inside and outside of Biltmore, and was patented by Rafael Guastavino, a Spanish architect and engineer who personally supervised the installation. The limestone columns were carved to reflect the sunlight in aesthetically pleasing and varied ways per Vanderbilt's wish. The rusticated base is a contrast to the smooth limestone used on the remainder of the house.
The steeply pitched roof is punctuated by sixteen chimneys and covered with slate tiles that were affixed one by one. Each tile was drilled at the corners and wired onto the attic's steel infrastructure. Copper flashing was installed at the junctions to prevent water from penetrating. The fanciful flashing on the ridge of the roof was embossed with George Vanderbilt's initials and motifs from his family crest, though the original gold leaf no longer survives.