Biltmore Estate

Biltmore is the largest privately owned house in the United States — a 250-room French Renaissance château that George Washington Vanderbilt II raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina at the height of the Gilded Age. Designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt with grounds by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture, the estate was a self-contained world of art, science, and forestry — and a monument to the fortunes and ambitions of America's wealthiest family.

In the late 1880s George Washington Vanderbilt II, a grandson of railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, began quietly buying up land in the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina, drawn by the scenery and mild climate. Ultimately he assembled roughly 125,000 acres. To design his home he hired Richard Morris Hunt, the most fashionable architect of the age, and to shape the landscape he engaged Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of New York's Central Park.

Construction ran from 1889 to 1895 and required an army of artisans; Vanderbilt even had a private railroad spur built to haul limestone, brick, and supplies to the site. Modeled on the Renaissance châteaux of France's Loire Valley, the house rose to 178,926 square feet — some four acres of floor space — with 250 rooms, including 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, and 65 fireplaces. It was fitted with electric lighting, elevators, central heating, and refrigeration that were cutting-edge for the era. Vanderbilt opened Biltmore to family and friends on Christmas Eve, 1895.

Olmsted's grounds pioneered scientific forest management in America; the estate's forestry program, led by Gifford Pinchot and later Carl Schenck, gave rise to the Biltmore Forest School, and much of the original land became the nucleus of Pisgah National Forest after Vanderbilt's widow, Edith, sold roughly 87,000 acres to the federal government. The family opened Biltmore to the public in 1930, during the Depression, at the request of Asheville officials hoping to boost tourism. It remains privately owned by Vanderbilt's descendants and operates today as a self-supporting estate with gardens, a winery, and hotels.