Biltmore Estate

George Washington Vanderbilt II, a grandson of the railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, first visited the Asheville area in the late 1880s and fell for the mountain climate and scenery. Over several years he quietly bought up a huge tract of tired farmland and cut-over forest, eventually assembling an estate of well over a hundred thousand acres.

To build his country house he hired the architect Richard Morris Hunt, who modeled the chateau on the great houses of the Loire Valley in France, and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York's Central Park. The house opened to family in 1895 after years of construction by a small army of workers, many of them local craftsmen who left their mark on the stone and woodwork.

The chateau holds 250 rooms, among them a soaring banquet hall, a library of thousands of volumes, an indoor pool and bowling alley, and dozens of guest and servant rooms. Vanderbilt filled it with art, tapestries, furniture, and objects gathered on his travels, and the family's original collections remain a large part of what visitors see today.

Behind the grand rooms lies an equally fascinating world of kitchens, pantries, laundries, and workspaces that reveal how a house of this scale actually ran. The estate was strikingly modern for its day, with electric lighting, central heating, and indoor plumbing at a time when such things were rare even among the wealthy.

Frederick Law Olmsted laid out the grounds as a sequence of experiences, from a formal Italian garden and walled English garden to a glass conservatory and a rambling azalea garden, all giving way to natural woodland and pasture. His approach and drives still shape the visitor's approach to the house today.

Olmsted also urged Vanderbilt to manage the surrounding forest scientifically, and the estate became a cradle of American forestry. The foresters Gifford Pinchot and later Carl Schenck worked here, and Schenck founded the Biltmore Forest School, the first school of forestry in the country. Much of the estate's outlying forest land later became part of Pisgah National Forest.

The estate remains privately owned by Vanderbilt's descendants and operates as a working destination. The old dairy barn was converted into a winery, and vineyards now spread across part of the grounds, with tastings offered among the pastures and river bottoms.

Beyond the house and winery, visitors can walk and bike miles of trails, tour the gardens through the seasons, and take in the farm and river country that Olmsted helped shape. The estate is especially celebrated at the holidays, when the house is decked out for Christmas, and in spring, when the gardens burst into bloom.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.