The Biltmore House is a grand and massive Chateauesque-style mansion located in Asheville, North Carolina, built between 1889 and 1895. It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt, who wanted to build a French-style self-sufficient country estate. The house is named for De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands, and is the largest private residence in the United States, with a 178,926 square foot (16,622.8 square meter) interior floor space.
Originally, the house stood 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. Over time, much of the estate has been parceled off and sold to help maintain the property. Today, the estate remains intact at 8,000 acres and is home to various tourist amenities, including museums, restaurants, and a winery, as well as a luxury hotel, shops, and other facilities.
The estate includes a walled garden, a large rose garden, gardener’s cottage, and a conservatory featuring various tropical plants that wouldn’t naturally grow in the local climate. The Italian Garden, which features a formal layout, fountains, and Italian-style sculptures, is located east of the terrace. In front of the house is a large lawn that runs east to the Esplanade, a stone wall with a series of stairs and ramps that switchback to an upper lawn, and a small belvedere with a Statue of Diana at the upper end of the lawn.
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, and Waddesdon Manor. The house features a facade clad in Indiana Limestone, with 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, and a large conservatory known as the Winter Garden.
Inside, the house features luxurious finishes, including carved woodwork, intricate plaster details, 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 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 was opened for public tours in 1930, which has since 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 during World War II, 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 in 1963 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. The estate is owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, and is today utilized as a museum and open to tours, with the estate serving as a major tourist attraction with nearly 2 million visitors every year.