Biltmore House, located in Asheville, North Carolina, is a grand Chateauesque-style mansion built between 1889 and 1895. The mansion was designed by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt. The house was named for De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands. The mansion is the largest private residence in the United States, with a 178,926 square foot (16,622.8 square meter) interior floor space.
The mansion originally sat at the center of a 125,000-acre (195 square mile or 510 square kilometer) estate, which included Mount Pisgah, much of the present Pisgah National Forest, Biltmore Village, and the upscale Asheville suburbs of Biltmore Forest and Biltmore Park. Today, 8,000 remaining acres comprising the modern grounds of the estate have been developed with tourist amenities, including the conversion of the estate’s various barns into museums, restaurants, and a winery, as well as the construction of a luxury hotel, shops, and additional support facilities. The estate today is a major tourist attraction, seeing nearly 2 million visitors every year.
The land, which straddles the French Broad River, was home to small farms and was in very poor condition before the estate was built – Frederick Law Olmsted designed the landscape of the estate, reforesting large areas, and creating a park-like setting with natural and artificial landscaped areas surrounding the house. Part of the estate included Biltmore Village, formerly a small railroad town known as Best, which was redesigned to resemble a rural French medieval village, with the fan-shaped street grid centering around the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls.
The Biltmore House features elements from various historic French Chateaux, including the stair tower and hipped roofs of the Chateau Royal de Blois, as well as various elements from the Chateau de Chenonceau, Chateau de Chambord, also in France, and Waddesdon Manor in England. The house features a facade clad in Indiana Limestone, with lots of Gothic details, leaded glass windows, casement windows, and double-hung windows, towers with steeply pitched hipped slate roofs, and decorative copper cresting, ornate wall dormers, an elevator tower at one side of the staircase, a large conservatory known as the Winter Garden next to the front entrance tower, which features an octagonal glass roof with a wooden Gothic support structure, a loggia on the west side of the house with sweeping views of the Pisgah National Forest in the distance, and a stable wing on the north end of the house.
Inside, the house features luxurious finishes, including carved woodwork, intricate plaster details, electric lighting and steam heat, multiple fireplaces, a large kitchen and laundry in the basement, many guest rooms, a massive four-story chandelier in the grand staircase, a basement swimming pool, bowling alley, and gymnasium, a large grand banquet hall, bedrooms for staff, and a two-story library. The house features antiques and decorations sourced from the Vanderbilts’ many international excursions and antique dealers, as well as lots of art.
The Biltmore House has been open for public tours since 1930, which has, over time, expanded in scale to feature more areas of the house and estate. The house was utilized to store 62 paintings and 17 sculptures from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1942, with Asheville believed to be a safe haven for them in the event that the United States was invaded by a foreign military, with the house remaining the repository for these important works until 1944 when the tides of war had turned.
Biltmore Estate was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1963 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. The estate is still owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, George and Edith Vanderbilt’s only child, and is today utilized as a museum and open to tours.