Biltmore Village: Vanderbilt's Planned Entrance to His Mountain Estate

When George Vanderbilt bought land south of Asheville in the late eighteen eighties to build his mountain estate, he did not just design a house. He designed the entire approach. Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect behind Central Park, laid out Biltmore Village in a fan shape at the estate entrance, inspired by the model villages of the English countryside. Vanderbilt renamed the existing community of Best and set about building a planned settlement to house estate workers and greet arriving guests.

The cottages and commercial buildings were designed by Richard Sharp Smith, the estate's supervising architect, and constructed around nineteen hundred. All Souls Cathedral, anchored at the fan's pivot point, gave the village its focal landmark. In nineteen twenty, after the estate needed to raise cash, the trustees sold most of Biltmore Village to a Charlotte developer, letting the community take on its own independent life. Today those turn-of-the-century brick and half-timbered buildings are a shopping district listed on the National Register of Historic Places, still wearing the architecture Vanderbilt ordered as a grand prologue to his two-hundred-fifty-room house in the hills above.