The Biltmore House is the largest privately-owned residence in the United States, located in Asheville, North Carolina. Built between 1889 and 1895, the Chateauesque-style mansion was designed by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt. The house was named after De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands. Originally covering 125,000 acres, including Mount Pisgah, much of the present Pisgah National Forest, Biltmore Village, and the upscale Asheville suburbs of Biltmore Forest and Biltmore Park, much of which has been sold.
The estate is located on land that was once home to small farms and was in very poor condition. To create a park-like setting with natural and artificial landscapes surrounding the house, Frederick Law Olmsted was hired to design the landscape of the estate, reforesting large areas.
Biltmore Village, formerly a small railroad town, was redesigned to resemble a rural French medieval village, with a fan-shaped street grid centering around the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls. Today, it features many shops, restaurants, and tourist accommodations, and has since been annexed by the city of Asheville.
The Biltmore House features elements from various historic French Chateaux, including the stair tower and hipped roofs of the Chateau Royal de Blois, the Chateau de Chenonceau, Chateau de Chambord, 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, and an elevator tower.
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 was opened for public tours in 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 1942, with Asheville believed to be a safe haven for them in the event that the United States was invaded by a foreign military.
Biltmore Estate was designated as a National Historic Landmark 1963, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. Today, still owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, George and Edith Vanderbilt’s only child, the house is utilized as a museum and open to tours.