Majestic Biltmore House Showcases Gilded Age Grandeur

Although it’s summer 2018, I’m thinking about my trip to Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC, as if it’s Christmas Eve 1895. On that date, George Washington Vanderbilt welcomed family and friends for the opening of his new 175,000-square-foot country home following six years of construction by a veritable army of laborers and artisans.

In the late 19th century when Vanderbilt’s guests crossed the threshold for that monumental occasion, Biltmore House, with floor space equivalent to four acres, was the largest private residence in America. I find it amazing, even improbable, given construction of untold numbers of mega-sized homes since then, that Biltmore House continues to hold that distinction today as it edges toward its 125th anniversary. It stands as a testament to what extraordinary ambition, vision, persistence, and means could produce.

What Vanderbilt first conceived as a simple hunting lodge when he purchased a small parcel of relatively flat and barren land eventually morphed into a Gilded Age masterpiece and marvel of design and then-modern technology on 125,000 acres. Noted architect Richard Morris Hunt found inspiration for the design in French châteaux. Biltmore was a self-sufficient estate with a working farm including a dairy famed for its milk, a 250-acre pleasure park with a series of formal and informal gardens, and dense forests.

Now at 8,000 acres, the estate offers dining, shopping, hotels, and a winery, but what rivets my attention is the house.

Its other vitals are just as staggering:

·      250 rooms
·      34 family and guest bedrooms
·      43 bathrooms
·      65 fireplaces
·      3 kitchens
·      Every “high-tech” amenity and convenience for the time, from elevators to refrigerators
·      70,000-gallon indoor swimming pool
·      Indoor bowling alley
·      30 miles of macadamized roadways

In a cheeky way, you could say that 33-year-old Vanderbilt, whose family fortune derived from shipping and railroads, was unveiling his extravagant “bachelor pad” for the holiday, for he had yet to marry Edith Stuyvesant Dresser or father Cornelia, their only child.

I wonder how impressions those inaugural visitors might have had compare to what the million and a half annual visitors like me experience nowadays at this National Historic Landmark.

Toggling between fantasy musings about the past and current reality is actually fairly seamless. Vanderbilt’s descendants have faithfully preserved Biltmore House, many original and priceless furnishings and artwork (50,000 objects) reflecting his intellectual and cultural pursuits and prolific travels, and its spectacular grounds. There’s a timeless and otherworldly quality to my visit – an intimation that Vanderbilt family members, friends, and staff are still at home amid a rarefied world of beauty and refinement.

Self-guided tour at Biltmore Estate

I enter the property through the red brick and pebbledash Lodge Gate. I proceed in my car at the posted 20 mph up the ever-winding and whopping three-mile-long Approach Road. Vanderbilt’s guests would have journeyed more slowly by horse-drawn carriage, having been met by servants at the Asheville train station.

America’s foremost landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted of New York City’s Central Park fame, created every curve, bump, rise, and descent of the roadway. Alongside, he planted flowering mountain laurel and rhododendron, thickets of river cane, grasses and ferns, and groves of hemlocks and pines. Every bend reveals a surprise. An outcropping of boulders. A burbling waterfall and stream. A stone bridge. A serene pond.

Altogether, the undulating road and dense woodlands are fostering my feelings of calm and solitude. Olmstead prohibited long views that would interrupt the natural flow and intimacy. Further, I sense mystery and anticipation building because the route offers not a single glimpse of the house.

Leaving my car parked in the visitors’ lot, I walk several minutes along a shaded path, exiting onto a vast grassy slope aptly called the Vista.

With a statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, to my back, at last the house comes into grand and glorious view. In the distance, beyond the Rampe Douce (meaning gentle incline), which is a graduated, zigzagging stairway, past the Esplanade forecourt with its front lawn and splashing fountain, and against a backdrop of blue-hazed mountains looms the stately structure.

Inside, the first-floor public spaces are where the Vanderbilts both lived and entertained. Soaring limestone arches and a polished marble floor set an impressive tone in the entrance hall. A woman flutist plays classical music near the adjacent glass-roofed winter garden with its oversized exotic plants, sculptures, and rattan furniture.

I remind myself that while Biltmore was a haven of hospitality, a private retreat, and a singular example of art and architecture, it was foremost a family home, albeit boasting an off-the-charts size and pedigree.

My favorite room is the Medieval-inspired banquet hall, the largest room at 72 feet long by 42 feet wide with a 70-foot-high barrel ceiling and perfect acoustics. Even though the decor is far from my minimalist design aesthetic, I appreciate its drama. I can imagine that first Christmas dinner. Men, perhaps attired in white tie and tails, and women in their evening finery, seated at the great oak table beneath massive wrought-iron chandeliers, framed by Flemish wall tapestries and the Vanderbilt crest, and warmed by crackling fires in the triple fireplace. They likely dined on George’s favorite meal of roasted turkey and cornbread dressing.

Other spaces are just as rich, eclectic, and evocative.

The sporty billiard room resembling a gentlemen’s social club. The breakfast room with an ornate plaster ceiling and tooled leather wall coverings, the table set with gold-trimmed dinnerware. The Turkish-influenced salon featuring a draped fabric ceiling treatment. The 90-foot-long tapestry gallery. The library housing 10,000 volumes on its walnut shelves beneath the ceiling’s striking oil painting, The Chariot of Aurora, from a Venetian palace ballroom. Assembled in 13 sections, the central canvas alone weighs 500 pounds. And the French Renaissance-style music room with a big secret – during World War II, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. quietly stored the country’s most precious art under armed guard here.

Stepping outside onto the loggia with other visitors, we heave a collective sigh of awe at the rolling landscape and mountain views somewhat diminished by an incipient storm. If I were Vanderbilt, this is where I would have begun and ended every day.

Upstairs, George’s and Edith’s bedrooms are the centerpieces. His, decorated in deep red, contains a 14th-century Baroque-style, four-poster bed on a raised platform, signifying his elevated status. Hers displays fabrics and upholstery in sumptuous cut velvet in gold and royal purple. I suppose both rooms have commanding views of the property, but draperies are fully drawn across the windows and lighting dimmed to protect the interiors from damaging natural light.

In the basement, along with the Halloween party space, gymnasium, bowling alley, pool, and dressing rooms, lies the service area – proof that it took a village to maintain the household at Biltmore. Corridors of servant quarters, pantries, kitchens and coolers, motor room, floral room, laundries, and sewing room, all displaying some original equipment, furnishings, and accessories, testify to the hustle and bustle of round-the-clock noise and activity that occurred underground.

Back outside, I stroll through multiple levels of gardens. Lush, picturesque, and detailed, they contain hundreds of varieties of flowering plants, trees, and hedges. A glass-roofed conservatory, pergolas, grapevine-entwined arbors, benches, walls, statuary, pathways, and pools accent the environment.

History-making art

My visit happens to coincide with the presentation of Chihuly at Biltmore, the first art exhibition in Biltmore’s Olmstead-designed gardens and the first garden exhibition of the sculptor’s large-scale glass in North Carolina. Dale Chihuly’s works are known for their vibrant colors, organic forms, and luminescence.

How Biltmore-like and how George Vanderbilt-like is that. Captivating works by two master artists from different centuries intermingled on celebrated and historic grounds.

Now that’s a fitting metaphor to cap off my own time-spanning reveries.