The Biltmore House is a grand and massive Chateauesque-style mansion located in Asheville, North Carolina. The house, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, was built between 1889 and 1895 for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt, who wanted to build a French-style self-sufficient country estate. The Biltmore House is the largest private residence in the United States, with a 178,926 square foot (16,622.8 square meter) interior floor space. It was named after De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands.
The house sits at the center of a 125,000-acre estate, which was originally home to small farms and was in very poor condition. 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, which was redesigned to resemble a rural French medieval village. Today, it features many shops, restaurants, and tourist accommodations and has been annexed by the city of Asheville.
The grounds around the estate include a walled garden, a large rose garden, gardener’s cottage, and a conservatory featuring various tropical plants that would not naturally grow in the local climate. Closer to the house, the large South Terrace enclosed by a rusticated retaining wall stands immediately south of the house. East of the terrace is the Italian Garden, which features fountains and sculptures, with a more natural Shrub Garden and vine-covered arbor south of the Italian Garden. In front of the house is a large lawn, which runs east to the Esplanade, a stone wall with a series of stairs and ramps that switchback to an upper lawn, with a decorative series of six stone fountains embedded into the base of the wall, 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 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 at one side of the staircase.
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 and has since then 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. The Biltmore Estate was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1963 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. Today, the Biltmore House is owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, and is utilized as a museum and open to tours. The estate today is a major tourist attraction, with nearly 2 million visitors every year.