Biltmore Estate United States

Legendary

This grand mansion built in the late 1800's was home to George Washington Vanderbilt II.

Photo by Warren LeMay

The largest private home ever built in America has 250 rooms, 35 bedrooms, and 43 bathrooms, and it opened its doors for the very first time on Christmas Eve.

George Washington Vanderbilt II built Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, starting construction in 1889. Vanderbilt was the youngest grandson of railroad and shipping tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the wealthiest men in American history, and George used part of that family fortune to build his own country retreat in the mountains.

He hired architect Richard Morris Hunt to design the mansion and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the same man behind New York's Central Park, to design the grounds. Construction took six years and employed around 1,000 workers.

The finished house was a French Renaissance-style château covering more than four acres of floor space, packed with cutting-edge technology for its time, including electric elevators and indoor plumbing throughout.

Biltmore stands as one of the finest surviving examples of Gilded Age architecture in the United States, a period from roughly the 1870s through the early 1900s when American industrialists built extraordinary fortunes and spent them on equally extraordinary homes.

Vanderbilt opened the estate to his family and friends on Christmas Eve, 1895, filling the mansion with festive decorations for its very first celebration. Famous guests over the years included authors Edith Wharton and Henry James, along with several U.S. presidents.

George Vanderbilt married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser in 1898, and their only child, Cornelia, was born right there at Biltmore in 1900. After George's death in 1914, the family eventually opened Biltmore to the public in 1930 to help cover the enormous cost of maintaining the estate.

Walk through the grand mansion and its 250 rooms, many still filled with the original art and furniture the Vanderbilts collected from Europe. Explore the gardens designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, including a conservatory filled with tropical plants. Visit during the holiday season to see Biltmore decorated much the way it was for that very first Christmas Eve in 1895.