Biltmore Estate

Just south of downtown Asheville sits the largest privately owned home in the United States, and it began with a twenty-six-year-old heir who wanted to build something that had never existed in America.

George Washington Vanderbilt the Second was the grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. In eighteen eighty-eight, after visiting Asheville and falling for the Blue Ridge Mountains, he began buying land. He eventually assembled a hundred and twenty-five thousand acres, a tract roughly the size of a small European principality. He hired the two most celebrated designers in the country: architect Richard Morris Hunt, who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and already designed mansions for other Vanderbilts in Newport, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park in New York.

Hunt modeled the house on the great châteaux of the Loire Valley in France, drawing from Blois, Chenonceau, and Chambord. The scale was staggering. A brick kiln on the property fired more than thirty-two thousand bricks a day during the six-year construction. Three miles of private railroad track were laid just to deliver stone and steel. More than a thousand workers and sixty stone masons shaped a building that would contain two hundred and fifty rooms, thirty-five bedrooms, forty-three bathrooms, an indoor swimming pool, a bowling alley, and a banquet hall that seated sixty-four guests under a seventy-foot ceiling.

Olmsted designed a three-mile approach road that curved through forest, hiding the house entirely until the final turn, so that first glimpse would hit with full force. The surrounding land was managed as a working farm, a managed forest, and a series of formal and informal gardens that remain among the finest designed landscapes in the country.

Vanderbilt opened the estate to family and friends on Christmas Eve of eighteen ninety-five. The total cost was roughly five million dollars, equivalent to nearly two hundred million in today's money. He lived there until his death in nineteen fourteen. His widow, Edith, opened the estate to paying visitors in nineteen thirty to help cover upkeep costs during the Depression, a decision that created what is today one of the most visited historic homes in America. Biltmore has remained in the Vanderbilt family for more than a century, passing to descendants who have continued to operate it as a private estate, winery, and inn. The house itself has never been sold.