Biltmore Estate: America's Largest House and the Ambition That Built It

George Washington Vanderbilt the Second was twenty-six years old when he first came to Asheville in the eighteen eighties, and he was already the heir to one of the largest fortunes in American history. His grandfather Cornelius had built the New York Central Railroad. His father William had more than doubled that inheritance. George inherited sixty-seven million dollars, roughly two billion in today's purchasing power, and he decided to spend a significant portion of it on a house in the mountains of western North Carolina.

The house is the largest privately owned residence in the United States. It has two hundred fifty rooms. Its floor area exceeds one hundred seventy-eight thousand square feet. The main banquet hall can seat sixty-four people at a single table. The library holds more than twenty-two thousand volumes. There are thirty-five bedrooms and forty-three bathrooms. It has its own bowling alley, swimming pool, and gymnasium. These numbers have a slightly numbing effect on the imagination, which is why it helps to visit.

Vanderbilt hired two of the most distinguished designers of the nineteenth century. Architect Richard Morris Hunt modeled the exterior on three Loire Valley châteaux, Blois, Chenonceau, and Chambord, adapting their steep rooflines, stair towers, and ornamental stonework into a style now called Châteauesque. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park in New York and the grounds of the United States Capitol, laid out the eight thousand acres of grounds, including formal gardens, a managed forest, and a working farm.

Construction began in eighteen eighty-nine and the house was formally opened on Christmas Eve of eighteen ninety-five. Vanderbilt invited family and friends for the occasion, including Edith Dresser, whom he would marry three years later.

After George's death in nineteen fourteen, the estate's scale became unsustainable. His widow Edith sold fifty thousand acres to the federal government, land that became the Pisgah National Forest. The family opened Biltmore to paying visitors in nineteen thirty, and it has operated as a private attraction ever since, receiving more than a million visitors a year.