What to do when you're the youngest son of the wealthiest man in the world and you need a summer getaway to shout out your station to fellow aristocrats in the Gilded Age? You don't need to factor in feminine preferences since you're single. You don't have the distraction of running the family's railroad company since your brothers do that. Considered a sensitive soul and still only in your 20s, you just have the pressure of social events, international traveling, and expansion of your beloved collections and no doubt to build something up to par with your family members' mansions in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. Faced with this situation, George Washington Vanderbilt II took the opportunity to build the Biltmore Estate outside Asheville in western North Carolina. He used only the finest craftsman inside and out for his 250-room, four-story abode boasting an imposing 375-foot front facade that mimics a French chateau. He then added multiple formal gardens, a conservatory, a lagoon and bass pond, and a working dairy and other animal farms. He also turned 8,000 acres from farmland and abused forest into a landscaped pleasure park replanting millions of plants under the supervision of the same man who did New York City's Central Park. With the house finished in 1895 after six years of work, he finally married, had only one child in 1900, and then died relatively young at 51 in 1914. George W.'s wife opened the family's house to the public in 1930, with a winery and a hotel added more recently in order to bring in tourist revenues, with never-confirmed speculation that George W. spent close to his $12 million inheritance to build the estate, with inflation setting the price tag up to $280 million in today's dollars. To date, Biltmore is the largest privately-owned house in the U.S., still in the hands of those with a direct blood line to its builder.
On top of a "rampe douce" lawn sloping down into the Biltmore Estate is a small sitting area with a statue of Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, who looks away from the mansion and gardens and behind them the broad range of the Appalachian Mountains. Perhaps some intentional modesty given the lack thereof I saw on my visit during a sunny day in September 2013. After an escorted van ride through dense forests full of rhododendron bushes and small grassy areas all planted and designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the mansion popped up with my initial take being that I was in France and not a small southern town far from any major metropolis. Designed by famed architect Richard Morris Hunt who also did the The Breakers mansion in Newport for older brother Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the chateau became more clearly a pastiched copy on closer inspection, with a multi-level circular staircase to the left of the entry and an indoor winter garden to the right, all sorts of added medieval embellishments added here and there. George W. clearly saw many European castles and cherrypicked what he liked. And so it was inside, with the public rooms housing his incredible antique collection mimicking the interior of European castles, primarily heavy carved wood furniture, sculptural and painted artwork, and tapestries. Private bedrooms and other spaces represented more of his era of decadence such as the owner's gold-gilded bedroom walls, extravagances unusual for the time such as running hot water, a tiled indoor swimming pool, a workout room, and a bowling alley. My second favorite room was his banquet hall, which like all the rest couldn't be photographed sadly (I cheated and used stock photos for this blog). Right out of King Arthur, the 72 feet-by-42 feet room had a barrel-vaulted ceiling reaching to 70 feet, a massive stone hearth replete with a handcarved frieze, knight armor adorning the walls, an organ spanning one wall like in a cathedral, huge 16th century tapestries, and a centerpiece table for 67 people. Scattered around the room were mounted deer heads, reminders of the forest surroundings. But as a sign of how out of place George W. was in the North Carolina countryside, the deer were not from the property, rather they were sent in from Washington State and were not his own hunting trophies, as a docent told me. The mansion felt as such overall, like a museum-level collection placed together to its best showing advantage but without the true warmth you get in a real country home other than the occasional family painting, which, of course, was done by other famous people like John Singer Sargent. Everything appeared untouchable, one-of-a-kind and preciously special and expensive, like any New York City salon of the time, and certainly not made by the hands of the owner other than the effort to open his wallet. Understood loudly and clearly was that whoever lived there had the money to buy whatever he wanted and he spared no expense.
So where is the heart of Biltmore? I would say George W.'s library, which was my favorite room. Housing about 10,000 books, it was the most cozy if that could be the word, with a huge black marble fireplace, deep red velvet furniture, a 17th centuy ceiling painting of angels imported from Venice, a winding ornate staircase up to a second floor of bookstacks. It felt like his private hideaway for quiet introspection. But as I absorbed all the glorious room design details, I again got the sensation that the person who built Biltmore was young (George W. was only 33 when it opened), indulging himself in an over-the-top way. He was not at all hard and rough like the mountains around him, not of the place at all, making me wonder what locals really thought when the New Yorker announced his grand plans to build an American version of the country estates of old royalty in Europe. The name Biltmore came about from combining the name of the Vanderbilt's Dutch ancestral hometown, Bildt, with the English word "more" meaning open, rolling land. I couldn't help but have my own definition, a shortening of the phrase "I built more." I wonder if George W. pointed that out during his family gatherings there.
Despite the mansion being George W.'s monument to himself and the Vanderbilt wealth, all that work for less than 50 years as a family home, the Biltmore legacy is actually much more than a prime example of fantastical wealth during the Gilded Age. The Vanderbilt heir in deciding to recreate the lands on his estate ended up starting the first school of forestry, the Biltmore Forest School opened in 1898. Up for debate at that time of great expansion in U.S. history was the concept of wilderness preservation based on not using natural resources as in John Muir's philosophy versus wilderness conservation based on using natural resources in sustainable ways as in Gifford Pinchot's philosophy. Before he became the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service formed in 1905, Pinchot was the first manager of Biltmore's forest lands. Originally spanning 125,000 acres, George W.'s land purchases encompassed what became the Pisgah National Forest in 1916, viewed from the mansion's many windows and viewing areas. The mansion unto itself with its impressive collection and design indeed has its place in architectural and interior design history. But at least for me, Biltmore's legacy comes from its role in celebrating the natural world, albeit in the Gilded Age way of luxurious excess. To get to Biltmore, I traveled from Gatlinburg, Tennessee, through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, dedicated in 1940, to the winding Blue Ridge Parkway, started in 1935. Along the way were simply amazing views of rolling forested mountains, which indeed have a blue smoky shading even at midday. I couldn't help but wonder if this beautiful area would be here if politicians decided not to listen to Muir and Pinchot in formulating land stewardship policies. What if George W. cared more about his book collection than the natural world outside his massive mansion door? What if thoughtful land management interested him far less than antique importing in order to show off to his friends? Biltmore uniquely encompasses two decidedly divergent trends of the time--America's full-blown industrial expansion and those few who benefited extraordinarily from it as well as the newborn movement to manage natural resources for the public good. What is good for one, what is good for all. Thankfully, George W. decided to build more of both.
