Biltmore Estate
America's largest privately owned house. George Vanderbilt's Biltmore House in North Carolina has 250 rooms and is the largest private home in the US. Its builders, gardens and history.
Biltmore House across the lawn: Blake Lewis, CC BY-SA 2.0
A Gilded Age dream
George Washington Vanderbilt II, a grandson of the shipping and railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, began visiting the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1880s. He bought around 125,000 acres and set out to build a country estate modelled on the châteaux of France's Loire Valley.
He named it Biltmore, combining De Bilt, his family's place of origin in the Netherlands, with more, an old word for rolling upland. Construction began in 1889, and Vanderbilt opened the house to family and friends in December 1895.
Hunt and Olmsted
Vanderbilt hired two of the greatest designers of the day. Richard Morris Hunt designed the house in the Châteauesque style, with steep roofs, towers and carved limestone. Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of New York's Central Park, planned the gardens, park and forests.
John Singer Sargent painted portraits of both men for the house, and the portraits still hang there today.
Olmsted also advised Vanderbilt to manage his woodland scientifically. The forester Gifford Pinchot worked on the estate in the 1890s, and in 1898 the forester Carl Schenck founded the Biltmore Forest School there, the first school of forestry in the United States. Much of the original land later became part of the Pisgah National Forest.
Size and comforts
Biltmore House has 250 rooms, including 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces and three kitchens. With about 178,926 square feet of floor space, it is the largest privately owned house in the United States.
It was also full of new technology for the 1890s: an electric Otis lift, forced-air heating, centrally controlled clocks, fire alarms, a call bell system for servants, an indoor heated swimming pool and a bowling alley.
Open to visitors
Vanderbilt's daughter Cornelia and her husband opened Biltmore to the public in March 1930. The estate was named a National Historic Landmark in 1963 and is still owned by Vanderbilt's descendants.
Today the estate covers about 8,000 acres and receives around 1.4 million visitors a year. Besides the house and gardens, it has a winery, hotels and trails, and it is a working example of how a historic house can pay for its own upkeep.
Many rooms keep their original furniture, books and art collected by Vanderbilt, and the library holds thousands of volumes. Seasonal displays, guided tours of the roof and the servants' quarters below stairs show how such a large house actually worked day to day.
- Biltmore House across the lawn: Blake Lewis, CC BY-SA 2.0
- The Italian Garden: P. Hughes, CC BY-SA 4.0
- The Walled Garden: P. Hughes, CC BY-SA 4.0
Text written by Greatest Prestige.
