The Biltmore House is a massive Chateauesque-style mansion built between 1889 and 1895 by Richard Morris Hunt for George Washington Vanderbilt II and his wife, Edith Vanderbilt. The house is the largest private residence in the United States, with a 178,926 square foot interior floor space. It was named after De Bilt, the place where the Vanderbilt family came from in the Netherlands. The estate, originally sitting at the center of a 125,000 acre (195 square mile or 510 square kilometer) estate, now covers 8,000 acres and contains tourist amenities, including converted barns, restaurants, a winery, a luxury hotel, and shops, as well as the house, which is now a museum open to tours.
Before becoming part of the estate, the land on which the estate is situated was home to small farms and was in very poor condition. Frederick Law Olmsted was responsible for designing 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 with a fan-shaped street grid centering around the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls. Today, Biltmore Village features many shops, restaurants, and tourist accommodations, and has 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, 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 an 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, with a porte cochere tower entrance to the stable courtyard, stone chimneys, and a loggia on the south side 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 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, 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 1963, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, owing to the house’s significant size, intact detailing, and connections to notable individuals.
The estate today is a major tourist attraction, seeing nearly 2 million visitors every year. The estate comprises 8,000 acres and contains tourist amenities, including converted barns, restaurants, a winery, a luxury hotel, and shops, as well as the house, which is now a museum open to tours. The estate is still owned by the Cecil family, the descendants of Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, George and Edith Vanderbilt’s only child.