This is the kind of place that makes you fall in love with history. No, really. Learning of the Gilded Age, both pros and cons, then digging into the personal histories of the people who built such estates. The Biltmore, in Asheville, North Carolina, was built by George Washington Vanderbilt II. We are here for the annual Candlelight Christmas Evening audio tour, arriving at the Entrance about 4:30pm. You are going to love this!
A few miles down the road is the Gateway. Here you show your tickets and get directions. With 8,000 acres and three distinct areas to visit, some advice is helpful for getting around. We are off to the left on a one-way road to the mansion. Luckily we find a spot at the top (very steep climb otherwise) of the closest parking area. With paved trails we are off to the mansion!
Wow!
Built between 1889 and 1895, the Biltmore is still the largest privately owned house in the United States. The mansion has 4 acres of floor space, 250 rooms on four floors and its full basement. There are 65 fireplaces, an Otis elevator (still working), forced-air heating, and fire alarms. While most homes in the country had no indoor plumbing or electricity, the Biltmore had both! The beauty of the architecture, of the 60+ Christmas trees and many other decorations, are only outdone by the many cutting-edge technological wonders for the era. We’ll talk of those as we walk the tour.
George Vanderbilt opened his luxury mansion on Christmas Eve 1895. He continually invited family and friends from across the country to come and enjoy the peaceful countryside and many lovely gardens.
In order to serve the family and many visitors, Mr. Vanderbilt had lots of servants. They were called servants because they served in a variety of ways meeting needs in both the mansion and on the grounds, but they were all paid a salary as well as offered room and board.
This is a unique welcome.
Off to the right of the mansion is a building that was once the Carriage House and stable. It held Vanderbilt’s prized driving horses (those that pulled carriages) and his many carriages as well those of his guests. The second floor housed the male servants. Today the first floor has beautiful shops and an open-air cafe. The second floor, offices and storage.
Great, it is time we get in line to enter the mansion.
Showing our tickets we each get an audio-tour device and off we go! Along the path to the front door we pass a very special Christmas tree.
This is Chihuly’s Winter White and Glacier Blue Tower. This Christmas world-renown artist Dale Chihuly has a large exhibit displayed in the Amherst at Deerpark on the Estate about three miles away. This is here to entice us to want more. Although we will not be visiting Deerpark, we will see a couple more beautiful glass displays in other parts of the Estate.
Welcome to the Biltmore!
The Atrium welcomes us with a choir, the Wilkes Central High School Chamber Singers from Wilkesboro, NC. Different groups perform nightly through December, coming from both North and South Carolina.
The Atrium’s glass ceiling is stunning!
The Banquet Hall is the largest room in the house and can seat 64 guests. Three fireplaces span the far wall.
The Christmas trees are beautiful and they are everywhere! Now that’s Christmas spirit.
A beautiful 35-ft fir Christmas tree graces the room’s opposite wall. The ceiling is 70-ft high and the acoustics in the room allows anyone at one end of the hall to hear someone talk at the other end–without yelling! Notice the organ pipes upper right. The organ gallery was built but never housed an organ during the family’s time in the mansion.
A short distance down the hall is the more intimate family dining room.
The dessert table and relaxing couch.
In this era, after dinner the women and men retired to separate rooms to visit and enjoy each other’s company. The women retired to what was called the Music Room and often included a type of piano. The men would typically retire to a library or billiard room or possibly a smoking room.
At the Biltmore the Billiard Room was the men’s retreat.
Down the hall, around the corner is the Music Room, the women’s retreat.
So, did George Vanderbilt have a library since the men met in the Billiard Room? Of course he did, and a library of about 22,000 books!
The Library is at the far end of the 100-foot long Tapestry Gallery hall.
One of two fireplaces in the hall, but the entire length was a place to gather, sit, and enjoy each other and the tapestries which always tell stories.
First view of the Library upon entering.
Two floors of mainly book shelves except for this lovely floor-to-ceiling fireplace.
Up to the second floor we go, the living quarters of the family.
This is Mr. Vanderbilt’s bed chamber. In this era of great wealth, a husband and wife had separate bedrooms.
With, of course, another beautiful Christmas tree.
Down the hall is Mrs. Edith Vanderbilt’s bed chamber.
In the hallway between their bed chambers was a sitting room, and of course the private hallway that connected the two bedrooms.
You can see the private hall behind the tree through the open doors.
There is a special Vanderbilt family room on the second floor above the library. This is the Louis XV room, part of a suite of rooms called Louis XV Suite.
Edith Vanderbilt chose this room to give birth to Cornelia, the first and only child of George and Edith. She was born August 22, 1900.
There’s Mom’s bed and lounge. She would stay here with the new born for a number of weeks. This is also where Cornelia gave birth to her two sons in the 1920s.
Up the staircase to the third floor we first see the Living Hall.
The third floor consists mainly of bedrooms for the many guests and artists/artisans that visited/stayed at the Biltmore. The Living Hall was their relaxation sitting room.
This is part of the Artists’ Suite of rooms, but it was the fireplace that caught my eye, and then . . .
. . . an unexpected decoration on top of the Christmas tree.
The fourth floor was off limits to us, but at the time it was bedrooms for female servants, again, each paid salaries in addition to room and board. Only women servants lived in the mansion. As mentioned, the men lived on the second floor of the Carriage House.
Heading down quite a few stairways, we are now in the very large basement with high ceilings. Much of the space was the service hub of the house with three kitchens, a laundry room, additional female servant bedrooms, the servants’ dining hall, and refrigerators. Refrigeration was unheard of at the time, most Americans had iceboxes. Running on ammonia gas, the fridges could keep 500 pounds of meats and veggies plus 50 gallons of liquid at 40 degrees, the approximate temperature of today’s refrigerators.
You can certainly tell the servant’s rooms by size and simplicity.
When the servants sat for meals here in their Dining Room, it was lower-level servants that served them. Now there’s an incentive to work your way up.
The basement also housed recreational rooms for family and friends including a swimming pool with changing rooms for men and others for women, a state-of-the art gymnasium, and a bowling alley.
This swimming pool held 70,000 gallons of heated water and cutting-edge underwater lighting. Although way ahead of its time, the real issue was the pool had no filtration, circulation, or chemicals to keep the water clean. Those had yet to be invented! This means that every three days the pool was emptied and thoroughly scrubbed. Clean water flowed down from a mountain reservoir two miles away, then heated with steam from the mansion’s boilers. Now it’s ready for the next excited visitors. One more thing. Men and women where not allowed to use the pool at the same time. Lots of things have changed since the 1890’s.
Up we go on the narrow staircase to the main floor. Narrow staircases were the servants stairways since they were not allow to use the main staircases and most main hallways in mansions of the era. They were to serve where needed, but were expected to remain quite anonymous, somewhat “invisible”. Their own narrow halls and stairs typically had entrances that were behind doors that blended with the wall coverings making them nearly invisible. Today people often assume those tough-to-notice doors hide secret passages and rooms. Do ghost stories come next? All depends who you ask my friend.
Going up the servants’ stairway, we see the servants’ entrance to the Banquet Hall. Beautiful from any angle.
Our next stop is returning our audio device and reflecting on our visit.
We visited 35 rooms in 2.5 hours. That’s a lot longer than expected but it was fabulous! Many people did not make it to tour’s end. All the stairs may have been too serious a challenge. They were challenging for us too, but we made it!
It is now about 9pm. One last look before our 10-minute walk to the car. No worries, it is a paved path with lights. Phew, it is really dark out here with a new moon tonight–no moonlight at all.
This seriously belongs on your bucket list my friend! It is on my list to visit again, but next time when the many gardens are in bloom.
Until next time . . .
