Even though Asheville is in the mountains, we didn’t expect frigid temperatures. We clearly should have thrown our puffy coats in the car before leaving. This morning was 27 degrees! We were not prepared for this cold, and it’s windy to boot. At least the sky is brilliant blue with full sunshine. That is some consolation.
The Biltmore is the largest, privately owned residence in America. I purchased tickets a couple of months ago. On the Biltmore website, it lists seasons, which means there are different decorations around the mansion. The fall season ended today, November 1, with the Christmas season starting November 2. Of course, ticket prices went up nearly $50 for the Christmas ticket, so stingy me saved some dough and booked for the last day of fall. We didn’t expect to see the Christmas decorations, but what we found on the tour is that most of the decorations had already been put up, so we had the best of both worlds.
The Biltmore Mansion is a Chateauesque-style mansion built for George Vanderbilt between 1889 and 1895 during the highlight of the Gilded Age. The mansion is huge, nearly 170,000 square feet, and the estate today covers about 8,000 acres, although George Vanderbilt originally purchased about 125,000 acres. He had visited the area in the early 1880s and had fallen in love with the area. He immediately started buying up the land. Construction started in 1889 and took 6 years to complete. Over 1,000 workers were used in the construction. Richard Morris Hunt was the architect, but more interestingly, Vanderbilt hired Frederick Law Olmstead, famous for creating Central Park in New York City, to design the grounds. It certainly is an impressive property. One of the things Olmstead did was to create a rustic, 4-mile winding road from the estate entrance up to the mansion. I can only image what it must have been like to ride in a horse-drawn carriage up to the mansion. The grounds are breathtaking and must be absolutely beautiful in spring. You don’t see the mansion until the very end of the drive. To get there now by car, you drive about 30 minutes through the estate, park, and then walk a little bit before you see the mansion.
The tour is self-guided using a handheld audio device. Each room is marked with a number so you can hear about what you are seeing. There are loads of people touring the mansion, but the route is well marked and the staff keeps you moving along. The staff is very helpful when you have questions about something, which of course we had. I understand that the staff moves every hour to a new location, so the studying that each had to do to learn so much is quite impressive. George Vanderbilt was quite the collector of art, furniture, and furnishings so there is so much to see and learn about. The decor is rich, but not gaudy or over the top. Vanderbilt was a perfectionist so everything was just so. We were really impressed by the whole experience.
Even though a lot of Christmas decorating had been done, the biggest project was going on in the banquet hall. The banquet room is massive with a 7-story high ceiling. A very large Christmas tree was being set, pruned and prepped for decorating. All the chairs from the banquet hall were in the Winter Garden, a fabulous circular room with a glass roof. I would have liked to see the banquet table all set, but the table had been removed and all the Christmas tree lights were spread out on the floor ready to be hung. Plastic was covering the 17th century tapestries that were hanging on the wall.
We went through the breakfast room, the salon, and the music room.
An interesting story about the Music Room is that during World War II, priceless paintings from the National Gallery of Art were brought to Biltmore and stored in the Music Room.
The Tapestry Gallery, 90-feet long, holds several Flemish tapestries from 1530 as well as other art, especially several portraits of Vanderbilt family members.
I think everyone’s favorite room is the Library. It was George Vanderbilt’s favorite.
Then on to the private area for George and Edith Vanderbilt. Separate bedrooms separated by a long sitting room, one side for George and one side for Edith.
There’s a wonderful circular grand staircase that winds around up to four floors.
We saw guest bedrooms both for normal visitors and important visitors. The Vanderbilt’s had a very active social calendar and hosted lots of very important people of the day. The important people got high end bedrooms with the best views and the normal people got less glitzy bedrooms. Down just one hallway there were 13 guest bedrooms. Of course, all the hallways became gallery space. George Vanderbilt had a huge collection of prints of famous works of art as well as other very valuable works, like Renoir and Monet.
We trekked down to the basement where we walked through stone hallways that showed just how massive the infrastructure was to hold up such a huge building. There was a really interesting exhibit about the building of the mansion showcasing some of the laborers and foremen who worked on the mansion.
In the basement, part of which is considered the recreation area, is a bowling alley, a swimming pool and a gym.
We then saw the “below stairs” area where staff lived and worked.
We peaked in to all the storerooms, the pastry kitchen, the rotisserie kitchen, the servants dining room, the flower arranging room and areas where the servants did their daily chores. I can’t imagine how much money it took to run such a household. Of course, the Vanderbilts were incredibly wealthy so they could afford it. The Biltmore is not the only Vanderbilt mansion so running all this opulence for them was affordable.
We ended the mansion tour by seeing the changing rooms, separate for females and males, and the men’s smoking room and gun room.
It was a really fascinating tour and we learned so much about the mansion, the era, the Vanderbilt family, and the importance of the Biltmore to the area.
And that isn’t the end of our time at the Biltmore. Next, we wandered around the expansive gardens. Even though most things are no longer blooming, we found lots of color in some of the gardens. And the Conservatory was really great.
We did spend quite a bit of time in the Conservatory, but I won’t post those photos because there really wasn’t much different than what I’ve posted in our visits to Marie Selby Garden in Venice, FL. But let me assure you, the displays, vegetation and flowers in the Conservatory were lovely.
One of the things we did at the end of our time was to ask for re-entry into the mansion. We were welcomed back in. We wanted to see the tree in the banquet hall to see it more decorated than we saw it earlier in the day. Amazingly, they were mostly done decorating and staff were cleaning up while the last couple of ornaments were being placed.
We snapped a few pictures of some of the exterior of the mansion on our way out.
The Biltmore Estate is really awesome and we were very glad that we paid the high price for the tour. We thought it was totally worth it. What a place!
We drove around some of the estate on our way out. We saw the Inn and hotel, the winery and a couple of the specialty restaurants on the estate. There is also a stables where you can book carriage rides, which I think would be a blast, but likely unaffordable for folks like us. On the estate are working farms and we saw cattle and sheep. There is a river running along one of the estate’s borders which was very picturesque.
We had a great day!