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| Dining room in the Biltmore Estate |
I like to stop at Visitor Centers when I travel. It is a
good place to get local maps and tips on the highlights of what to see in the
area. Typically, I scan the rack of free pamphlets and rarely leave without a
few things that interest me. One such promo piece was for the Biltmore Estate
in Asheville, North Carolina. Fortunately, I read the brochure that night and
noted that it was very close to where I was so the decision of where to head
after I finished my research at the East Tennessee History Center was set.
For those that don’t know Biltmore was the home of George
Washington Vanderbilt. He retained Richard Morris Hunt, architect to design the
home, which is comparable to the most extraordinary European castle, and he
hired Frederick Law Olmsted, known as the “father” of Landscape Architecture,
to design the grounds. I expected grandiosity but this place far exceeded my
expectations. The “home” has 255 rooms and encloses 2.4 million cubic feet of
space. It was constructed between 1889 and 1895 in the French Renaissance
chateau style. It has a swimming pool and a private gym in the basement, a
billiard room, dozens of guest bedrooms, separate rooms to store different types
of preserved food, a room for vases with a large table for arranging flowers
for the house, and it has one room devoted to drying bed sheets.
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| Room in the basement for drying bed sheets |
Several movies have been filmed in the house so one of
the extras are mannequins dressed in the costumes from these movies staged in
the various downstairs rooms of the house. Signs provide the name of the film
and the name of the costume designer and note whether or not the designer won
an academy award. I’ve never seen this done before and I liked it – the figures
added a lot to convey the sense of grandeur.
The house tour led us through three floors and some 35 or
40 rooms of the house. I was tired at the end of the tour but when I began to
explore Olmsted’s landscape I revived, despite the heat.
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| View of the mansion from the Italian Garden |
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| Conservatory at the mansion entrance |
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| Dining room with 3 fire places and tapestries on the wall |
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| A small detail |
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| Dining room fireplace |
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| Even the ceilings were elaborate |
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| View from the house |
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| Writing desk |
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Detail on the exterior - each was unique at
either side of a row of arched windows |
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Vanderbilt's library that houses 22,000 volumes - many
first editions |
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| Ornamental ironwork in the staircase |
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| One of the dozens of fireplaces in the mansion |
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| Original painting of Frederick Law Olmsted |
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| Mr. Vanderbilt's bedroom |
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| Costume from Jane Eyre book |
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| Mrs Vanderbilt's bedroom |
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| One of the dozens of guest rooms - each was uniquely furnished |
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| Each guest room has a separate space with a writing table |
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| Each guest room has a fireplace |
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| Room to store preserves |
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| One of my favorites - a room for arranging flowers |
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| Room for ironing and folding linens and clothes |
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| Billiard room |
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| Smoking room with costumes from Sherlock Holmes film |
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| View of the Vanderbilt mansion from the entry court lawn and fountain |
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| Front of the mansion |
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| Detail of the back of the mansion |
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